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

I've got a long address to this very question, just published last month. Here's the link: https://www.cckp.space (go to the paper "Our Minds, Our Selves: Mind, Meaning, and Machines" to download it for free). 

Short take: it's a mistake to consider the product alone as the artwork. Art is a matter of a complex interaction between creator and appreciator; it necessarily involves a social context, and the values which structure social context involves sentience (feelings of pleasure and pain). Machines can, because they already do, produce "meaningful" sequences of words, notes, colors, etc. These artifacts become artworks when someone regards them as such.

I agree with @sns when he mentions "sentience" as important in distinguishing real human minds from computer simulacra, but then he goes on to say "If people perceive it as a sentient being isn't it a sentient being?" This assumes something like the Turing Test, or "Imitation Game," as sufficient for determining machines as genuine minds. I think this is mistaken (as does Searle, Chomsky, Chalmers and many others). Again, see my essay linked above for a full discussion, if you're interested.

The overwhelming majority of music is not the work genius.  It's work and involves craftsmanship, but it usually involves working within forms that is fairly well defined and providing small variations to those forms.  For most listeners likable music has to sound somewhat familiar without sounding exactly like something else.  Music has to sound like you expect it to sound and when it doesn't it's hard to engage with.  AI should be really good at creating most music types and some of this generated music might actually sound "good".  But just like most human created music, most it won't sound "good".

In the late 1990s computers started beating grand masters at chess.  Somehow people still play chess.

I’m not sure that AI would affect my listening habits much. Almost everything I listen to is from the 50’s through the 70’s. 

If it sounds good it’s good. I’m sure a goodly amount of music is manipulated at the bench so to say, what’s the difference. Instruments are man-made someone that can’t sing can’t sing…or run it through the process, bingo a star is born ! So get used to it, shellac 78 records are toast.