I imagine the goal posts will for ever be moving when it comes to defining what art is, but ultimately optimizing for human emotional sentiment does not seem that difficult a problem. Art is mostly just a combination of past works optimized for the modern audience. Seems like the perfect problem for AI. We often judge a future AI in terms of how well it could replicate current things but the real question is what happens after it perfects that replication? AlphaGo alone shows that the AI is likely to discover new styles that we failed to examine before, why can't the same happen with Art?
Generative music already is a tool / method in some artists' portfolio (particularly in ambient or experimental circles). However, it doesn't tend to be the only approach.
AI could perhaps work soon for certain formulaic music (like say bubblegum pop) as well as some forms of synth music (I easily can see generative minimal techno for instance). I will say that people don't tend to like overly formulaic music though; they tend to like the twists, turns, and "personality" that people can bring to art. Even in pop, formulaic pieces are quickly forgotten. But it's probably possible to write an algorithm now that does this sort of stuff really well.
Beyond pop formula, I think AI advocates sometimes underestimate the difficulty. There are no real "rules" in music. The music of the world is very diverse, the "rules" even in pop / folk vary from culture to culture.
Many styles of music are way beyond AI at this point IMHO. They are either much more technically complex (Western classical) or rely on improvisational skills that I would think would be difficult to parametize (jazz, Indian classical) Heck, even with something like say blues music, which pretty much uses the same template for most songs (well, a similar rhythm and similar chord changes at least), you've still got the soloists and the singing. Vocaloid ain't got nothing on Muddy Waters or BB King etc. :)
Also I don't think people in general cares that much about the music as much as the idea of the identity behind the music. For AI music to be popular in a context where the an actual artist has to be emulated you either have to fool people into believing it's a real human behind it, or antopromoprohize the ai sufficiently to be promoted like a human.
Music has meaning, it's a tool for communicating very complex ideas.
I don't think anthropomorphising something that generates pleasant sounds is going to get you anywhere, by the time you get anywhere interesting, you've become the artist.
Here[1] is an interview with Alex Ebert where he discusses a non lyrical song teaching him about death.
Do either of you write or play any music? What supports your arguments other than a few marketing op-ed pieces put out by Google in the last couple of year?
You do realize that Google's self-driving cars and other AI research programs are mainly exercises in show business themselves, right? Well kudos to the people running public relations down in Mountain View, they've certainly convinced their target demographic that Google is the place to be for AI research!
> AlphaGo alone shows that the AI is likely to discover new styles that we failed to examine before, why can't the same happen with Art?
Because Go is a game with set of rules and clearly defined winner. Art has no rules and no winners and no losers. You can only program a computer, be it a neural network or some other machine learning algorithm, to deal with a finite set of inputs. Human oversight is still needed to set up and do the initial training of unsupervised learning algorithms and obviously needed during the entire process of supervised learning.
The number of variables that go in to a music production are pretty astonishing. I'm guessing you have pretty much no experience with writing lyrics, melodies, counter melodies, arranging a song, playing the drums, playing the bass, playing any accompaniment, singing, recording, mixing, and then mastering. There's probably around a billion subtle variables that go in to what ends up being 4 minutes of a stereo recording. I would imagine it would take hundreds of thousands of man-hours just to train the initial complex neural network that could get anything that would spit something out that remotely sounded like the Beatle's Yesterday. Perhaps it wouldn't take as much effort to reproduce some plastic pop star, but you know what? People don't really like that shit. Kids do. For like 3 weeks. Then the plastic melts.
You know what, this is basically pointless. You've made your mind up to remain ignorant about music. That's your prerogative. I'm safe in my knowledge that some genious in the Bay Area isn't going to be taking my job playing covers in a bar room any time soon. What, do you think a bunch of people sitting around in a dive bar want to watch a laptop sing them country music? But who knows, judging by how tasteless and uncultured most techies are, you guys would probably be fine with listening to the world's worst poetry, the world's worst instrumental lead, and the tackiest, lamest, emotionless expression of the inhuman condition a machine could possibly imagine.
Why do AI zealots hate humanity so much? Are you ashamed of our past? Do you treat your parents and friends and family as ultimately replaceable by a machine? Art is much closer to the home and heart than you're realizing. I mean, it's you whose gonna end up driving real love away from your own life. I'm surrounded by a bunch of lovely morons who are fine with their shameful existence and are fine from spending the rest of their years being far from perfect and living side by side with misery and sin. You'd better get acquainted with reality at some point. You're still just a bag of flesh and bones with a set expiration date!
Rest in peace, Merle. It's a shame he never got around to learning about and writing about techies... although if you use your imagination his "Here In Frisco" is pretty damned close:
It's four a.m. in New York City, three a.m. in Dallas
The night is still early here in Frisco
Market street's still going, the same old shows are showing
And I'm still all alone here in Frisco
They say it's raining in Chicago, but it's cold and clear in Denver
Been windy all night long here in Frisco
Trolley cars are clinging, the big Bay Town's swinging
And I'm still all alone here in Frisco
The way I feel tonight, I won't be staying long
But when I leave, I'll leave my heart just like in the famous song
Trolley cars are clinging, the big Bay Town's swinging
And I'm still all alone here in Frisco
And I'm still all alone here in Frisco
---
Yup, and I'm still all alone here in Frisco, sitting around with my Artificial Love Machine and my Oculus VR wired directly in to the Google-Apple-Amazon mothership circling the earth... full-stack, full vertical integration, corporate assisted lifestyle... pumps me full of vitamins and movies made by computers.
That this doesn't sound like the living embodiment of hell on earth, I don't know what the fuck does...
