Robot Reviews

What's immediately interesting about these machine-generated reviews is that they kind of wash over you and  if you're not vigilant, things might actually be incorrect. I haven't gone through it to determine whether the analysis is correct or not, but I think for the most part it is, and is interesting in the sense that it is giving me insights that I wouldn't have gotten from other people. Machines might have more access to the group mind than we do because the group mind is AGI, and AGI is full of cliches, which are the popular views that the public would have, primarily that music is an emotional phenomenon. But when you're composing music, the emotions aren't there in the moment because everything is slow and methodical at that point: you're composing note-by-note or bar-by-bar, thinking about the overall architecture of the piece, and emotions can get lost in the shuffle. But composers have always been more Apollonian than Dionysian. It’s also annoying yet compelling how the voices are designed to be more human by putting in stammering and other “yeas” and “rights” so as to make it more engaging and entertaining.

Music is just as much grid-like and rectilinear as it is curvilinear and emotional. I’m reminded of something the artist Chuck Close said about music inspiring his process (which was all done with a grid), that when you work sequentially, you don't have to always reinvent the wheel with an emotional reaction to something as a form of “mirror art”--you can just go right in and do the work, and there's no invention necessary. So what's actually happening in large language models is that they’re using a combinatorial process derived from the data set, which is the very cold and unemotional description of what's really going on, and people have always worked this way. Now with all the talk about the differences between the left and right hemispheres, AI is definitely all left hemisphere, yet it's talking about things like emotions which are primarily right hemisphere. Even in machine-generated music, there are emotional moments that do occur, but it's not that those emotional moments are coming from an entity that knows what emotions are, and so it has to rely on the cliche version of it. There might be some cliche entries in the book I must admit, but at least they're cliches that I had used, and not a machine. There are always multiple ways of expressing our ideas, and sometimes we just can't avoid cliches because we can't think of everything that’s ever been expressed, but AI eventually will be able to. But it's still going to be two different kinds of thinking.