Atomic Razor

The Ear of the Beholder

Someone with the handle musicologyman recently opined on Bluesky

‪musicologyman‬ ‪@musicologyman.bsky.social‬

I’m confident that generative AI will never produce a symphony worth hearing. The result will undoubtedly be technically assured, but aesthetically and historically bankrupt.

and

‪musicologyman‬ ‪@musicologyman.bsky.social‬

Writing a great piece of music requires life experience & a sensitivity to so many aspects of an individual’s social, historical, and psychological situation that it would be virtually impossible for an AI to replicate.

"[V]irtually" there is doing a lot of heavy lifting, but is it true? Beauty certainly exists in nature. The tree I can see out of window of the library or my study is beautiful, contrasted today against the pure blue sky. In the library, the high windows frame the tree.

 

So, found beauty is a thing. A sunset, a flower, the sky at night, a pebble, the Mandelbrot set, a Game of Life pattern, a lava lamp, the swirling streamers of Jupiter, a galaxy. Some of those we weren't evolved to find beautiful and some of them require a great deal of craft to find. As Del asked do we like fractals because we like trees or do we like trees because we like fractals? But there's no denying that beauty can be both found and generated by various kinds of systems.

 

No-one is also going to deny that bird music can be beautiful too. A lot of music is samey. If you are writing a 100 symphonies, you are probably going to repeat stuff. After Beethoven, there's more pressure to be original, but a lot of music sounds like other music. As we have said, there's have been generative music systems since the C18th at least.

 

musicologyman allows that an AI's symphony would be "technically assured", which seems fair, but that it would be "aesthetically and historically bankrupt". "Historically bankrupt" seems a strong claim. After all, the AI would be trained on all (well, a lot of) the symphonies ever written and would develop its own taste. After all, where do our tastes come from? "[A]esthetically [...] bankrupt" seems a more reasonable claim, but might not be. "Writing a great piece of music requires life experience & a sensitivity to so many aspects of an individual’s social, historical, and psychological situation", but the problem with that kind of claim is that we can't quantify a person's "life experience" or their  "sensitivity" to the aspects of their "social, historical, and psychological situation". Haydn wrote a lot more symphonies that Beethoven and under a very different mode of production. But they are both great composers. We might prefer Beethoven or feel that he's able to be his troubled artistic genius self. Haydn wouldn't have been Haydn if he had come after Beethoven. 

 

You can't weight a person's soul. Note that composition is something that is taught. It's not like writing, something you are just supposed to be able to do it. We might be suspicious of the creative writing M(F)A, but not of studying composition. But, yes, a teacher might feel their pupil needs more life experience that a 22, their work is gauche and jejune and that they need a few unhappy love affairs to be able to fulfill their talent. But that isn't something you can quantify. You might be a better composer at 32 or 42, but I'm 57 and there's only so far you can go. Ultimately, like blind-tasting wine, we might feel that it is cheating because in the way the big Californians are flattered in the tests might be the same for AI-generated music. "If I had known this was AI, I wouldn't have liked it as much." I mean it's not as though anyone is writing great symphonies right now as it is. My hope has always been that AI can open up new vistas, whether in music or writing or art or mathematics or science, as it did with go. Let's see what it can do. Brian Eno sure to approve. 

 

 

 

Is A(G|S)I Denial the COVID/Climate Denial of the Left?

People are losing their shit over the Seattle Worldcon using AI to vet people. I am not really how much people should be being vetted, historically whoever was organising the programme would just assign people they knew or trusted to appropriate items. That seemed to work fine for decades. I guess there are a lot more programme items these days that at, say, Conspiracy in 1987, which probably had three programme streams plus stuff. I think it was the one that had the Third Programme (boom, boom!). Definitely had a film programme, which you don't seem to get these days. Paul and I went to see The Right Stuff. I mean given that a lot of fans are (a) profoundly irksome; (b) right-wing, it's hard to know what you are vetting for. Some people might be persona non grata, for some reason (Dave McCarthy), but what about the puppies, say? I suppose you could argue they launched a direct attack on the Hugos, but then they are hardly the only ones in recent years. There's the case of people being fraudulent and you might want to avoid having worst enemies on the same panel. A difficulty in 2025 is that there are several polarising issues about which things could kick off.

One of those is AI. So, people want the convention to pledge not to use "LLMs". Of course, it would be extremely silly to specify "LLM" specifically. Or even AI. As David out, how would you even know you weren't using AI? And that's going to be even more true in 2 years and then in four. It's like saying in the early 1990s, don't use email or the web. But the real problem is that a lot of dislike AI. Of course, I am booster. But we are not going to have a Banksian post-scarcity Culture-style society without A(G|S)I or even Fully Automated Luxury Space Communism. So, AI is Bad because it is stealing jobs or stealing my job or corrupting the youth or being developed by rapacious high tech companies that are destroying the world or is merely a stochastic parrot that can't do anything useful and is forever necessarily prone to hallucinations or can't do basic algebra or work out how many "r"s there are in "strawberry" or based on stolen IP or memorising the internet or is environmentally damaging or will go the way of the Zuck's metaverse in another few weeks or months or enable deep fakes or make relationships with other humans even more difficult for a lot of vulnerable people or end up destroying the planet through creating mirror life or gray goo or weaponised microbes.

The thing is that a lot of those things are actually true. The world is in a very bad state and a lot of the companies pumping resource into AI or also responsible for contributing to the awfulness of the world. AI enables some definitely bad things as well as some potentially good ones. A lot of people don't have access to the latest frontier models and don't realise how powerful they have become. For a lot of people, they don't need or want to use them right now, so they seem extraneous. Like the web for most people in the mid-1990s. The A(G|S)I Derangement Syndrome arises though when opposition to AI becomes a ideological shibboleth, just as COVID or climate denial is for many on the right. But we should mark the world of Thomas Pynchon from 1984, which I mist have quoted before 

If our world survives, the next great challenge to watch out for will come - you heard it here first - when the curves of research and development in artificial intelligence, molecular biology and robotics all converge. Oboy. It will be amazing and unpredictable, and even the biggest of brass, let us devoutly hope, are going to be caught flat-footed. It is certainly something for all good Luddites to look forward to if, God willing, we should live so long. 

It is 2025 now and Thomas Pynchon is still alive about to publish a new novel and we have finally arrived at an epoch at which the curves of research and development in artificial intelligence, molecular biology and robotics are all about to converge. It will be amazing and unpredictable, and let us devoutly hope even the biggest of brass are going to be caught flat-footed. Because if we want something like our Banksian inheritance, the Left is going to have seize what might be its Last, Best Chance. It will be no easy ride, but the alternatives are all too easily imaginably unimaginable.