Artists & Algorithms: Christine McLeavey Payne | GP Interview #23

This is the twenty-third in a series of interviews with explorers, thinkers, artists, activists and other luminaries around the world, people whose life’s work resonates with our founding principles.

Christine McLeavey Payne, where the river meets the sea

Our friend Christine McLeavey Payne is a Member of the Technical Staff at OpenAI, where she recently published MuseNet and Jukebox. Christine studied physics at Princeton, and neuroscience and medicine at Stanford. She’s a trained classical pianist and concert musician.

Not one to shirk from healthy skepticism and speculation, Christine and I chatted about the present and future of AI and all of its myriad impacts on society and the workplace.

GP: You’ve spent the last few years using AI algorithms to generate novel music. You’re also trained as a classical pianist. Have algorithms learned to develop their own style? How might a real life human musician interact with a composing algorithm?

CMP: Models like MuseNet, Jukebox, and other AI music algorithms are still very much the early steps — they’re like students at conservatory who are learning how to imitate the great musicians of the past.

I love when MuseNet suggests a new and surprising way a Mozart sonata could have gone, or when Jukebox generates a sample that sounds like Ella…