“Honesty is the best policy,” George Burns said. “If you can fake that you’ve got it made.”
The same applies to feeling in composition and musical expression. Long ago I went with a friend who was a pianist and composer, to a concert by a somewhat famous pianist. While I was enjoying the concert, she grabbed my hand and pulled us out of the place. “Didn’t you hear it?” she said after we left. “That guy wasn’t feeling it.”
No AI will ever feel anything. There is no “next level” where it will feel in a human way—or at all—because AIs are machines and the human stuff they do is all emulation. That emulation can do superhuman stuff. But that doesn’t make them human. It makes them uncanny. And useful. (Hell, I’ve quickly come to rely on AI for lots of stuff, every day. It’s extremely handy and often fun.)
All that uncanny stuff is emulation. Pattern matching. Way-cool parroting. Even when it can beat a human at Go or recite pi to trillions of digits, a machine is still just a machine. It ought to be good at stuff machines are better at than humans. Feeling isn’t one of them.
Right now I want to finish this post. That want is a feeling in my creative drive. I’m not doing this shit just because I’ve been programmed to do it.
As you sit, watch, and listen to musicians in a top-ranked orchestra, what amazes you most, besides the music they play, is fellow human beings can do this stuff at all, and do it together. Why sit, watch, and listen to robots doing the same, even if they do all of it better, technically?
Will there be robot musicians as original, and moving, as Miles Davis? Will robot artists be better at doing Picasso than Picasso? Better at Shakespeare than Shakespeare?
Not if they can’t feel. And, I submit, none ever will.
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