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Comment by throwaway143829 | Hacker News Reader

Your comment seems to presume that AI will not get any better than it is now. Imagine an AI that understands how to create deep, impactful music better than humans do, because it understands how music works at a biochemical level. Imagine it can even predict the dynamics you're describing, about employing "unwanted artifacts" in the music as a way to evolve new genres. It would no longer need to create such obviously derivative works at that point, and it could generate music that sounds completely unique to us. It may take a long time to reach that point, but when it does, the kinds of music that it generates won't be able to be dismissed so easily.

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Your comment seems to presume that the line between what a human is and what an AI is will stay clear. I'm predicting that this line will be increasingly blurry. Some people see smartphones as cybernetic extensions. When I call someone across the globe, did I do that or my phone? Is that a capability I posses or my phone? Does it make sense to separate the two?

Even if AI gets way better, the one thing that I don't foresee changing is what makes things valuable and or desirable. Sparsity. If everyone has it or can create it, it's not special. I think the GP was referring to this sparsity.

You're talking about agency there I think. No your phone didn't do that, you did.

However, if later down the line we create autonomous agents that can initiate the creation of said music themselves then I'd call that enough agency to say that the machine is "making music". Could probably almost do it now; tailored LLMs, image diffusion, music diffusion and you could have an ML agent that acts as a musical artist; posts to instagram etc with images of their persona "working on something new", releasing new tracks, bantering, etc. There are already AI OF stars apparently.

We could say "yeah but a human still set it up and told it to make music" but I would discount that; pretty sure no human has total agency, we are all impacted by our environment, peers, culture and all sorts of other external influences.

And I don't think sparsity changes things (maybe in the material world) but culture certainly does. Things are popular because they appeal to us in bulk, rarity/sparsity always result in higher effort for the payoff and so decreases popularity.

Alright, what if someone has a neural implant and that thing is running and or connected to an AI? Are you still sure the line is clear and sharp in that scenario?

I think that requires a baseline reasoning capability that we see no signs of developing as of yet.

In the field of AI, only game playing / graph search has gotten to that level of superhuman capability.

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