Rise of the machines?
BBC Music Magazine|August 2023
Artificial Intelligence is suddenly everywhere, and its tentacles are stretching into the musical world. But there's no need to panic... at least not quite yet, says Tom Service
Tom Service
Rise of the machines?

AI: it’s not artificial, and it’s not intelligent. That’s a paraphrase of the computer scientist and composer Jaron Lanier’s take on AI as a work-replacing, culture-consuming and composer-destroying technology.

Yet how can Lanier be right? Because AI’s virtual tentacles are already grasping into the real musical world: if we can generate deepfake Drake and artificially resurrect John Lennon, what are the possibilities for classical cultures? Algorithmically induced Bach? Virtually composed Smyth? Network-synthesised Brahms?

This story is from the August 2023 edition of BBC Music Magazine.

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This story is from the August 2023 edition of BBC Music Magazine.

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