The independent band Nanyang Party NYPD is on the frontline of music, taking the lead in using AI to create music. How does the academic community view it?
Roberto Alonso Trillo, assistant professor at the School of Music of Hong Kong Baptist University, one of whose research interests is "music and AI", accepted an exclusive interview with this newspaper to discuss his views on AI and music creation (Q&A translated and excerpted).
Answer: Roberto Alonso Trillo Question: Yan Jiabao
Q: AI should logically do some monotonous and repetitive tasks to release human creativity. However, today the trend is in the opposite direction, and AI is creating new music. What do you think of this trend?
Answer: Human intelligence is already a simplified model, map, and reflective self-narration, and AI can only be a model-of-a-model. However, as a memory machine, AI digitizes and condenses human experience. If it can move towards a more powerful AI paradigm and go beyond simple statistical inference and imitation without wisdom, it may deviate from the human wisdom we are trying to express and reveal and become a kind of human intelligence. Alien powers that originate within us but transcend our own ability to model and understand the world.
Q: Some musicians use generative AI to create music. Do you think generative AI is a form of creativity? Do you think music created using AI can still be called their work?
A: The term (creativity) retains many meanings - it is British cognitive scientist Margaret A. Boden's evaluation criteria, such as novelty, value, surprise, etc.; or it is the driving force affecting the capitalist free economy, which is most important to us. It's important. If the question is, when content is generated within the realm of art, does it qualify as artistic production, then the question is slightly different. When we arrive at an age where content is sustainably produced, instantly available and fully automated, it may be worth looking at how art is defined in other ways – if this is still necessary. To a certain extent, generative AI may not be a challenge to art, but the historical peak of "creativity dispositif", such as the myth of "the god of agriculture devouring his son" (note: "dispositif" from The philosophical thought of French philosopher Foucault refers to the system, mechanism or knowledge structure that constructs power relations).
Discussing authorship outside the paradigm of legal intellectual property rights is also complex. As mentioned above, the question is whether we should focus on "Who is the author? (ontological level)" or "Who counts as an author? (Legal level)". We often face this dilemma when working across disciplines in academia. The concept of the individual author has long since been deconstructed, with many believing that all creation is dialogical.
Q: What do you think are the limitations of using generative AI to create music? Is there anything missing from the music generated this way?
Answer: To provide a historical framework for my answer, it is enough to look at the artistic changes represented by photography in the mid-to-late 19th century. Photography was initially seen as a mechanism of reproduction, with some commentators stating that it could never capture "the exquisite feeling and emotion that animates the work of genius" or "the necessary qualities of creation and feeling that constitute a work of art... Photography will never be better than Sculpture has a higher status" (These were published in a British art journal in 1855).
So, what are the limitations when AI generates music, and will anything be missing? We can look at the current mainstream commercial AI interfaces. Most of them were created since the introduction of the transformer model (note: a deep learning model) in 2017 and later evolved into the large language model (LLM). They are extremely limited to a descriptive approach, that is, a blinking cursor or chatbot model (such as Suno and Udio), from the user (the idea) to the computer (the executor), from top to bottom, through many A linear dynamic process of the semiotic translation stage. However, we found that in the field of musical instruments and music performance, there are a large number of non-linear, co-creative relationships between humans, materials and sounds. How to integrate them and their interface design are the keys to breakthroughs.