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Musicians Versus the A.I. Machine. Why Bother Writing Songs Anymore?
Five humans convened for a weekend to create new music from scratch. Could they do better than A.I.? Could you even tell the difference?
Musicians Versus the A.I. Machine. Why Bother Writing Songs Anymore?
Five humans convened for a weekend to create new music from scratch. Could they do better than A.I.? Could you even tell the difference?
Matt Richtel is a writer interested in exploring the dynamics between human creativity and technology.
In this era of pervasive artificial intelligence, is human creativity a waste of time? To explore, we conducted an experiment that we could use your help judging. Below are two songs, one made by professional musicians and the other by A.I.
Now learn about how they were created. Does it change what you think?
I’m Matt Richtel, a New York Times reporter, occasional songwriter and the ringleader of this experiment.
The idea was straightforward: Four top-shelf, lifelong musicians and I would spend a weekend in a recording studio to write and record several songs nearly from scratch. We wanted to see whether we could do better than A.I. at making fresh music. And would it be worth our time, hassle and occasional creative dispute?
The main questions we hoped to answer:
What are the core differences between the human creative process and a machine’s?
Could we make something better than A.I., or even distinguishable from it?
Looking back, should we have just stuck the lyrics into the machine?
This was our cage match: carbon life-forms versus silicon chips, with you, the readers and audience as the ultimate judge.
Day 1
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