There's music and then there's music. I'm glad they are at least thinking about long narrative structures.
Ultimately I don't think this is a very worthwhile because I personally believe the entire definition of art and music is a production that is filtered through the human experience. The same piece of music would mean more to me coming from a human than from an AI or program. If someone told me it was from a human and then later told me it actually came from an AI, it wouldn't really accomplish anything deep; it'd just make me feel tricked.
Well, look at it this way: The AI is really not so different from us in intelligence (although presently dumber), but it's different in motivation. It's has only one single "desire", namely to understand you and write music that connects with you. It's not trying to fool you, it's trying to understand the human experience itself, and tell back to you what it is seeing.
Isn't it OK to let ourselves be moved by its love letters to humanity?
Every Monday, there are hundreds of tweets from Spotify users who declare that the Discover Weekly algorithm understands them better than anyone, that they want to marry it etc. (This is a remarkable testament to neural network AIs. Not many people want to marry Netflix or Amazon's recommender system, to put it like that!)
Of course that only finds music for you, it doesn't create it from scratch. But given the immense size of the library it searches through, that's impressive enough that many really get the feeling that it knows you, understands you. I hope generative algorithms will be that good one day, and I won't waste time worrying that it's fake once they are.
That's an interesting thought. I have no idea how complicated this is, but I wonder if a Spotify or Pandora has a chance to some day develop something that can _generate_ music tuned specifically to the listening habits of individual users.
At least leave us humans some of the joys in life - art being one of them. Automate the bland stuff so we have more time to idle away our days mucking around with an instrument or paints or clay.
Ultimately I don't think this is a very worthwhile because I personally believe the entire definition of art and music is a production that is filtered through the human experience. The same piece of music would mean more to me coming from a human than from an AI or program. If someone told me it was from a human and then later told me it actually came from an AI, it wouldn't really accomplish anything deep; it'd just make me feel tricked.