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The Sony Computer Science Laboratory in Paris recently announced that researchers have created artificial intelligence capable of writing entire songs. This development adds “musician” to AI’s resume. It also builds on the recommendation engines that power Spotify, Pandora, and iTunes, so we’re not too far away from the day when AI can write a bunch of songs and create a playlist for you, too. This sounds like it has potential to annoy, but we certainly have human friends like that.
(Feel free to read on as you listen. Let AI be your soundtrack.)
“Mr. Shadow” is one of two songs (along with “Daddy’s Car”) created by a system called FlowMachines, which designs new music from “a huge database of songs … exploiting unique combinations of style transfer, optimization and interaction techniques.” Tastes may vary. And while the system does rely on humans for lyrical and arrangement help, AI is dipping robot toes into all kinds of cultural waters.
Google’s Deep Dream project showed us the inside of a computer’s subconscious and dubbed it art. How it works: Feed images into their program and it finds patterns in the data that get recombined in ways that humans call psychedelic, but that computers call, probably “Tuesday.” The results feature a lot of animals and eyeballs and look like peacocks designed by H.R. Giger.
Credit: Research at Google
Will AI write the next Great American Novel? Imagine the possibilities: “The Sun Also Reboots,” “The Heart Is an Asymmetric Encryption,” “Gravity’s Rainbow.” I won’t say it’s definitely there, but it’s on its way. Researchers at Japan’s Future University Hakodate built an AI program that they primed with pre-existing text and then turned loose to write. The result: a novella called “The Day a Computer Writes a Novel,” which doesn’t score big points for creativity (maybe the AI is a student of modernism?) but did get past the first round of “a national literary prize,” which invites a lot of facepalm from humans struggling with their character development.
When IBM’s “Watson” used its four terabytes of esoteric information to defeat human “Jeopardy” champs in 2011, humans took small comfort in the fact that, if AI is going to take over game shows, at least we will still make better use of the jet skis we win in “The Price Is Right.” Until the jet skis, too, become autonomous.
IBM has kept Watson busy. After the company used its AI to usurp the human dominion over trivia, it directed it to conquer the kitchen. IBM Chef Watson is an AI-powered site that uses something called “cognitive cooking” to build recipes. Start with an ingredient or a dish and good old Chef Watson will come up with some culinary options for you, expanding on a recipe base from its partner “Bon Appetit.” But the AI hasn’t mastered the saddest extremes of human cooking, as it had no suggestions for what to do with Eggo waffles, cookie dough, and white wine.
No AI news dominates the headlines so thoroughly as self-driving cars, which feel like the future we’ve all come to expect from the past. (No jetpacks, no cities in the sky, but at least we’ll have robot cars.) Companies are racing to be the first to market, and cities are racing to figure out how to keep from becoming “cognitive demolition derbies.” But it’s happening, and soon. For now, it’s a novelty here, a game show there. Before we know it, though, AI will propagate throughout many aspects of society and culture. What might be strange is not how you cook a meal with AI, but how you ever cooked one without it.
