AI doesn’t do irony, I’ve heard. Last week, at a symposium on “AI and the Musician” sponsored by the Audio Engineering Society and Berklee College of Music, keynote speaker Tod Machover said that Generative AI is also not good at musical structure, emotion, performance and interpretation, adaptability, or cultural sensitivity.
Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the show?
The irony of this AI conference – the part that AI would be incapable of perceiving - was that every statement boosting the technology could also be taken as a critique. Composer and MIT professor Tod Machover, in his keynote, played examples of cutting edge Generative AI music that he pronounced, “pretty [pretty] good.” But why we need a new technology to produce mediocrity, he didn’t explain.
I admit I lost patience quickly with the tech idealism that permeated the place, and after a couple more presentations of pretty good…
