lpetrich
Contributor
In 1979, Douglas Hofstadter wrote the book Gödel Escher Bach, an Eternal Golden Braid, discussing a variety of topics, like Kurt Goedel's Incompleteness Theorems. Among them was the prospects for artificial intelligence, complete with "Ten Questions and Speculations". They include:
The same can be said of other sorts of artistic creativity, I think.
I'm quoting at length because I could not think of a good way of trimming it down. DH seems to be arguing that for that to happen:Question: Will a computer program ever write beautiful music?
Speculation: Yes, but not soon. Music is a language of emotions, and until programs have emotions as complex as ours, there is no way a program will write anything beautiful. There can be "forgeries” shallow imitations of the syntax of earlier music but despite what one might think at first, there is much more to musical expression than can be captured in syntactical rules. There will be no new kinds of beauty turned up for a long time by computer music-composing programs. Let me carry this thought a little further. To think-and I have heard this suggested-that we might soon be able to command a preprogrammed mass-produced mail-order twenty-dollar desk-model "music box" to bring forth from its sterile circuitry pieces which Chopin or Bach might have written had they lived longer is a grotesque and shameful misestimation of the depth of the human spirit. A "program" which could produce music as they did would have to wander around the world on its own, fighting its way through the maze of life and feeling every moment of it. It would have to understand the joy and loneliness of a chilly night wind, the longing for a cherished hand, the inaccessibility of a distant town, the heartbreak and regeneration after a human death. It would have to have known resignation and worldweariness, grief and despair, determination and victory, piety and awe. In it would have had to commingle such opposites as hope and fear, anguish and jubilation, serenity and suspense. Part and parcel of it would have to be a sense of grace, humor, rhythm, a sense of the unexpected-and of course an exquisite awareness of the magic of fresh creation. Therein, and therein only, lie the sources of meaning in music.
- The software must experience the emotions that we do
- The software must do so when given music in audio-data form.
The same can be said of other sorts of artistic creativity, I think.