If A.I. took the place of musicians, would you listen to it?


A few questions which I'm curious about. If you have a take on this, please share!

Here's the question:

A.I. is increasingly playing a role in music creation. Not just assisting composers, but generating music.

If you found an A.I. generated song to be enjoyable, interesting, etc. would you have any objection to supporting it by listening and paying for the service which provides it?

If more and more music was like this, and there were fewer and fewer jobs for musicians, would that bother you? -- I'm thinking here about the aesthetics of the issue, not the economics or justice of it. 

I'm trying to understand if people just want to have a certain set of sensations from music and they don't care if there are human beings creating it -- or if it's important for you to know that what you're experiencing from music (or art) is coming from human beings.

Thank you for thinking about this.

128x128hilde45

Likely not.  For whatever reason I want to hear music that a human being has created of their own imagination after working hard to master (at least to some degree) a musical instrument.  I find AI interesting and use it in my work but in terms of artistic creativity I prefer human endeavors.

@hilde45 - 'Sermons in church'? Don't get me started there.

Not everybody here has a wife and kids.  

And yes, that would go for painting, novels, and other arts. An AI-written novel would not stop humans from writing novels or other humans from reading them. Same goes for paintings. I see it as 'more', not 'instead of'. ... 

Yes, although I lament the abuse that A.I. can bring, too late to do anything about it and any protest to reverse direction would be fruitless.

@hilde45

"Ah, so it's just their present state of development, and you have no objection to AI in principle -- it's just not good enough. I feel the same way about butter substitutes, but not about art."

Why would I object to AI until it has done something objectionable? Technology is not the enemy. It is what we do with it that causes all the problems. Comparing AI to butter substitutes is apples to oranges.

Besides, what I said was....

"Until AI is capable of actual creative genius, as opposed to merely clever mimicry, it will never push creativity forward or have the ability to touch our souls."

Cherry picking parts of a quote to suit your narrative is never a good practice.

It is an open question of how far AI can go. This is the most dangerous experiment I can think of. We can't really even control ourselves, how can we hope to be able to control we don't know what ? And why bother with this AI nonsense, anyway ?

Primitive robots is one thing and true AI is something completely different.