The heart of a machine

Natasha Moore
Jul 30, 2017 · 6 min read

How do you feel about this song?

What if I told you a machine wrote the song in collaboration with the producer — Alex da Kid? Would it change how you feel about it?

This machine uses Artificial Intelligence (AI). And what is Artificial Intelligence? AI by definition in Merriam-Webster is ‘ The capability of a machine to imitate intelligent human behaviour.’ This definition isn’t giving much away and perhaps this is why the majority of us are still in the dark on a topic which could shed some serious light on some of today’s global issues including poverty, health and education.

Despite these buzzwords — ‘Artificial Intelligence’, becoming more and more prevalent in the last couple of years, I only really took note of it in the last couple of months due to being a part of the digicraft team at the Lions International Festival of Creativity when I stumbled across the song you listened to when first opening this article. That’s quite worrying in my opinion, surely I should have acknowledged something which has the potential to completely change the way inwhich society functions many moons ago, not just last month?

But perhaps this has happened because only recently has it came to my attention that AI is beginning to greatly influence something so deeply important to me — music, and something so innately human — song writing. You may now be thinking that I’m a bit late in the game to realise that technology has in many ways taken over the more conventional ways of producing music, from replacing the instruments to even replacing the voices on some songs. But I think AI is a step further than just replacing the end result of a song created by a human. It is infact replacing the human needing to be the creator. And it is this point I feel very torn about.

Some may argue in one way it is no different to how producers, composers and songwriters really make their music today
But on the other hand I feel if you de-humanize a man-made melody and instead manipulate mega-data to produce the ultimate ‘heart -wrenching’ robotic version, this would, in someway, be……a disrespect to the art.
Sure I’ll be listening to the lyrics of how the singer painfully shares with us their heartbreak when really there was no heartbreak at the root of the song. But I guess this argument is invalid because this is just like saying a ghost writer is effectively acting the same as AI i.e. they write the song and someone else sings it. So in either case you still aren’t getting the original individual who went through the struggle and wrote the song necessarily . But I guess the even bigger difference is that in its original stage in the latter example a human wrote it. Whereas in the former the human did not. The human touch was lacking. This is what I struggle to accept. Art — the ability to express, is something so innately human to me and so to lose this expression in music would be an injustice to the music itself I feel.

I don’t want to come across as someone who is anti-AI, I’m certainly not. I can appreciate many of today’s situations where AI is greatly improving our quality of life and in the future I have no doubt that with further efforts into this area of technology it will continue to do so tenfold over.
Just take a look below:

The Good

- Wouldn’t you agree that the ability to foresee illnesses before the symptoms have a chance to appear would be truly life changing — IBM Research are paving the way for this ‘miracle’ become a reality in the next five years.

- Food harvesting — You see these apocalyptic films where the world turns into utter chaos due to the scarcity of food. Well the blockbusters may hold some truth. With the global population growing at rate surpassing anytime in history, leading to a predicted extra 2 billion people on the planet by 2050, it would seem foolish of us humans to not turn to other means to alleviate the issue of food production. This is exactly what Intel are aiming to assist by providing farmers with the digital systems needed to gain real time data on their cropland so they can make the most efficient decision to gain optimum produce from the land.

- Mental health diagnostics: IBM Research released the news of its aim to use AI to recognize the words we say/ or may not say as a forecaster to mental illness such as depression and diseases for example Alzheimer’s.
So with all of the potential literally in the world, what can we truly have against Artificial Intelligence?

The Bad

- ‘AI will take our jobs’ (the general fear among society) — graph showing the likelihood of certain jobs being taken over from humans by AI in the future:

[ These images are courtesy of CNN. I do not own these images ]

Although it is argued that humans, being naturally innovative, will find new roles needed to be filled, it still shows the signs of the very act that perhaps humans are already being squeezed out of our own societies by the very things we put into them.

- They can fool us: You get no expression from a computer screen unless you see your own squinted face in its reflection if you’re sitting in direct sunlight. This poker face from our laptops doesn’t seem so menacing but perhaps when your very own computer is plotting to terminate your very existence because you let its battery die then its lack of expression may become that little bit more unsettling.
Speaking of lack of trust. Can we even trust our own thoughts never mind those of a machine? You may know of the following story I am about to share with you, for once you know of it, it’s difficult to forget. It involves the Turing Test.

You may have heard of this test developed by the known British Scientist Alan Turing. A test of foolery, can a machine fool a human into believing that the machine is infact a human too? (To cut a long story short).
Well turns out it can, maybe not disguised as the knowledgeable responsible adult but certainly as a pre-pubescent Ukrainian boy as reported the BBC in mid 2014.

Or even more recent than that, it’s been reported that MIT’s AI passed the Turing Test (if this info is not accurate please do let me know)!

My point is, this shit is scary! If the mechanical robots can trick us into believing that they are living breathing squishy human beings then I fear mankind has well and truly met its match. Don’t you?

Keeping with this morbid theme, let’s go a step further:

The Ugly

Stephen Hawking — a man who is assisted by advanced technology has quite a striking opinion on Artificial Intelligence as can be seen below:

Video

With speculation on whether Artificial Intelligence will be for better or worse to us. Only time will tell I guess. Or what if……it became us?

article

Does this sound appealing to you? If you can’t beat em’ join em’ eh? You the f*ck wants to be trapped inside a computer screen?
But what if the human/robot hybrid (and no I’m not referring to those creepy mechanical sex dolls) isn’t well bred enough, what if the robots want us out of the picture completely? With a self-learning mechanism there would be nothing stopping the machine becoming more intelligent than us. It may even get to the stage where they ‘rebel’ (start conspiring with eachother through secret little chats watch) and could no longer be controlled by us. e.g. ex-machina (have you seen the film, that robot is hot)!.

I think I’ve went way off topic, I started this article talking about AI specifically in relation to music and got somewhat waylaid due to the ‘controversy’ surrounding the theme. But my argument still holds — Artificial Intelligence will inevitably reduce the amount of work we will have to do, be it in manual labour roles to making art — music, the question is — will the outcome of this process be worth us getting lazy for?

p.S. before you try and sue me, I do not own any of the rights to the property mentioned in this post — this includes the Song ‘Not Easy — IBM Watson / Alex Da Kid

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