Consider two tracks that are identical (forget copywrite for a minute). Between one that an AI generated and a human composed, I would personally grant the human-generated version more credit and enjoy it more. The story of how art is created and the stories of the artist are as substantial to appreciating art as a stroke of a brush or a note on a page. Computers will never replicate this until singularity.
Even accepting the premise, what happens when the next artist with a great story is simply using MuseNet to write their emotional pieces and passing it off as human? They'll be functionally the same, yet it still feels like something was lost.
Given two stories, both identical, where one story is real - the real story will always be more meaningful because it has actually happened within the constraints of our reality, granting it validity and us the ability to relate to it.
Now, consider two stories, both identical, where one story is "real" and the other story is from a simulated universe. Now I'd say that both stories are of possibly equivalent value, since both have happened.
I wonder, if they can compose, how long until passable lyrics are added along?
Human potential always intrigues us "What? Human can do THAT?" kind of way.
Yes, the machine and AI can do the same thing at the fraction of time, from the practicality standpoint, but it's not and never be the same — it's empty. It's just lifeless product and we never feel related to it.
ML/DL is coming for a lot of the grunt work. It's coming for us as programmers as well. It's probably a few years away, but ML/DL
I've been training on Stack Overflow and the model has already learned the syntaxes and common coding conventions of a bunch of different languages all on its own. Excited to see what else it's able to do as I keep experimenting.
Some sample outputs (you'll probably want to browse to some of the "Random" questions because by default it's showing "answers" right now and I haven't trained that model as long as some of the older question-generation ones): https://stackroboflow.com
To give an idea how big is the gap between MuseNet and CodeNet, we can consider a simple problem of reversing a sequence: [1,2,3,4,5] should become [5,4,3,2,1] and so on. How many samples do you need to look at to understand how to reverse an arbitrary sequence of numbers? Do you need to retrain your brain to reverse a sequence of pictures? No, because instead of memorizing the given samples, you looked at a few and built a mental model of "reversing a sequence of things". Now, the state of the art ML models can reverse sequences as long as they are using the same numbers as in the dataset, i.e. we can train them to reverse any sequence of 1..5 or 1..50 numbers, but once we add 6 to the input, the model instantly fails, no matter how complex and fancy it is. I don't even dare to add a letter to the input. Reason? 6 isn't in the samples it's learnt to interpolate. And CodeNet is supposed to generate a C++ program that would reverse any sequence, btw.
At the moment, ML is kinda stuck at this pictures interpolation stage. For AI, we don't need to interpolate samples, but need to build a "mental model" of what these samples are and as far as I know, we have no clue how to even approach this problem.
We will definitely get a great code autocompleter at the very least..
The program does not have volition.
Why would you think that using statistics to generate a model of a piece of art (which is just data in the case of MIDI and pixels) would be "off-limits"? People have been doing this for decades.
No one knows the answer to your last two questions, but there is no indication that this program is leading there.