Machines will never equal, much less surpass, musicians. Let alone jazz musicians, who have a unique and differential factor both in their creative and interpretive process: improvisation. Despite this, the concerns of the jazz players were evident on the third day of the Vitoria jazz subscription, at the start of the programming of its most emblematic stage: the sports center Mendizorrotza. Especially those referring to the possible behavior of the public before the works generated by artificial intelligence (AI).
The debate began after the premiere in spain of Data lordsthat record claim of Maria Schneider against the greed and control of large technology companies, and their commercial and tyrannical use of citizen data. And also against the misuse of technology, embodied in all the new AI platforms that are being developed around art and culture. The renowned North American composer and director already advanced it to the supplement The reading from EL MUNDO: «Being a musician is not necessarily a choice: it is a necessity, a call that you cannot give up. What worries me is that the public is no longer able to differentiate real music from music made by humans. The magic of music lies in its humanity, in the spirituality of life, and I am not clear how AI-generated music will be received by people, who will have to learn to listen again.
The artist agrees with her colleagues on the impossibility of machines to create music, let alone jazz, based on the fact that her results are works made from patterns already created -these yes- by human beings. “In the end they are still copies, bad copies, which as a curiosity can be fine,” he says. Moses P. Sanchezsummoned in Vitoria to release a five-movement suite commissioned by the National Center for Musical Diffusion together with the pianist Marco Mezquida. “I want to believe that once this curiosity passed, people would return to the human creation.”
As a curiosity, he also interprets it Pachi Tapizdirector of the main jazz website in spain, tomajazz.com, and professor of statistics, computer science and mathematics: «Right now AI does not offer optimal results. In the absence of clear patterns, when he has to give answers, he gives them, but in many cases inventing them. Man, it’s nice to see what he does when I ask him for a composition of Led Zeppelin in the style of Monkbut already».
Marco MezquidaFor his part, he underlines the words of his partner: «I very much doubt that AI can be at a human level, with all its potential for knowledge, listening, decision-making, and emotional intelligence. It is true that he can emulate and compose, because creation and composition is possible by providing him with a lot of information and specific parameters so that he can specialize in it. If possible, it will take a long time, if at all, but you can never replace an improvised solo, interact in an integrated and coherent way in a dialogue with another musician. Certainly in jazz… It seems completely impossible to me!».