Aerosmith removed from roller coaster preshow at Disney's Hollywood Studios

It can do that.

LostKause:

Music comes from the human soul; it's one thing unique to us and makes us humans. I’m not sure where AI music comes from.

I was thinking on this notion just yesterday. Late last week, a descending line of jazz chords kinda popped into my head, and next thing I knew, I was writing a piano arrangement of Go Tell It on the Mountain, which I'll be playing at my church's Christmas Eve service. I've been crazy busy with theatre and music stuff (outside of my 9-5 job), so I didn't figure I'd have time to fully develop it and memorize it in less than a week's time. But I felt compelled to keep coming back to it, and last night I finally got it where I want it.

So yeah, I wrote the arrangement, but... I'm sure I've heard that descending line of jazz chords somewhere before. The grace notes, the walking bass, little connective flourishes... at some point I'm pulling from numerous jazzy things I've played before. Not enough to run afoul of copyright law, but still. Add to that, the original tune is an African-American spiritual with no known author. So the notion of "originality" and "where does music come from" has crossed my mind.

And if an AI were fed all the same jazzy arrangements of Christmas music I've played, I'm guessing it could've churned out something very similar to what I did. And yet... I think my arrangement is pretty damn good.

So with all that, I don't really have a conclusion, but there's at least enough wishy-washiness in this post to generate An AI Charlie Brown Christmas.

Human exceptionalism is a weird thing. What you and Travis allude to is real, and art in particular is not something we see outside of humanity. Our knowledge of the universe is certainly limited, but it's still amazing. Art itself has speculated on the capability of machines to create human-like expression, and maybe arrogantly declared that it wasn't possible. Even as good as it is, we can generally sniff out the fakes.

Of course, we're also ephemeral and relatively insignificant in the universe, and tend to still be killing each other. Maybe we're not as remarkable as we think. I still love art and artists.