The Moral Case for Human Music

> Making music is hard, especially when you’re a beginner. But does that fact justify using AI to do it? In general, hardship is a reason to skip an activity only if that activity doesn’t have some other value that compensates for the hardship. For example, the effort involved in hiking to the top of a mountain is a reason to take the cable car only if hiking to the top doesn’t have a value that compensates for the effort. And so, using AI to make music only makes sense if music-making has no value that compensates for the hardship involved in learning to do it.

> Thus, the promotion of AI music-generation software tacitly construes music-making as what I’ll call a “purely telic” activity. (I’m drawing on the MIT philosopher Kieran Setiya’s discussion of “telic” activities here, telos as in “end” or “goal”, in his excellent book Midlife.) A purely telic activity is one directed at a terminal state of having done something (the “telic” part), where the activity has no value beyond that of achieving the terminal state (the “purely” part). Construed as a purely telic activity, music-making has no value over and above that of having produced a piece of music, and so the more efficiently you can get to that point, the better. AI music generators make perfect sense on this view. The problem, of course, is that the purely telic view of music-making is false. For a musician, the point of making music isn’t merely to end up having made a piece of music: the actual making is part of the point.

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