There are a lot of criticisms of AI. Some strike me as valid; others do not…but when I pause to think about exactly what AI applications in a certain domain, such as music, should be allowed or forbidden, I am at something of a loss. This is a shift from social problems to the aesthetic, artistic, dimension. I can’t seem to escape the Enlightenment tendency to treat the aesthetic as something subjective, relative to the eye of the beholder. As a middle-aged guitar player who has spent thousands of hours learning to play, there’s the tempting reactionary tack, that people who use AI to make music aren’t “really” musicians, because they don’t “really” play an “instrument.” Here’s why I think that’s arbitrary, silly nonsense…

The point I’m making here is that a lot of the hype around “thinking machines” and artificial intelligence seems to be Team Descartes, ignoring that he got it really, really wrong when it comes to what it means “to be.” To that end, one of the amazing and disturbing things about living in the world today is the word “algorithm” has made its way into so many places. Most people know what algorithms do. An algorithm probably decided that you would be reading this post (or not) based on whether the words in it triggered some key words that suggested it might be interesting to you, and so it popped up in your social feed or search engine results or whatever. Algorithms decide what you see, watch, read; they steer you toward what to buy and where to invest, they decide how much to charge you for insurance, how to win baseball games, prosecute wars, catch welfare and tax cheats; and even whether you’re an efficient enough worker not to get fired.

But an algorithm is just a complicated mathematical model…