Star pianist: AI will never replace me
NewsFrom an interview by Christian Berzins with Khatia Buniatishvili:
Do you think art will change fundamentally in this century? Do you think that an AI will play more beautifully than humans?
No, an AI cannot play better.
Why not?
Because art is part of human beings. Humans created art because they wanted to survive. At the end of their lives, humans leave the world and this knowledge tears them apart. Humans created something that resembles themselves from their own imagination. Art is the most human thing of all. It contains the imperfections of humans and it will outlast them. Humans do not want to simply eat, work, sleep and then die. They want more than that.
So AI can’t create art?
Beethoven’s unfinished 10th Symphony was finished with an artificial intelligence. That wasn’t Beethoven (laughs). It’s like love. Do you want to go on a date with an artificial intelligence? Maybe. But it will never be the same as between two people. For me that is unthinkable, which is why I say I am a person of the 20th century. For me that would be the end of humanity. Art is part of humanity.
Entirely correct. Why would anyone pay to go watch a piano move by itself? Even those fancy internet-connected new Steinways which were sold as ‘Igor Levit in Berlin could give a concert in your living room in New York’ rely on the fact there’s a human artist at the other end (and, incidentally, I haven’t seen a big rush for remote-controlled concerts yet – maybe I don’t dwell in the right social circles).
Of course, what will happen will be the same as in the cheap writing world now: AI-listeners will digest AI-generated music, and we’ll just cut out the middle, just like now you can use AI to read more efficiently the text that an AI model generated more efficiently. It’s still not art. I could, however, well see human art becoming even more of a luxury than it is now – humans for those who can afford it.
There are two things that AI will never replace.
three
Five.
Nothing earth-shattering but very touching in its sincere insights. An accomplished artist with a clear view of her place in the scene. All power to her elbow.
AI doesn’t have to play the same as a human pianist to replace him/her. Instead, what looks likely to happen is that the firehose of AI-generated content will simply take over music listening for the younger generation, and then human classical performers and their music will become even more marginal than they already are. Rick Beato’s YouTube channel and Ted Gioana’s blog have exhaustively explore how the band-oriented pop music of yore has been nearly wiped out by clever operators that know how to optimally exploit the channels that most people use today for music listening, and AI will only accelerate that trend; classical music will not be immune.
This is probably the most sensible answer to this question.
Spot on
She’s right.
She gives a very thoughtful answer. I have heard AI “music” and it just sounds derivative and mechanical. The Beethoven “10th” completion was not very convincing. Some of the attempts at Bach come closer, but still seem hollow. But no one can say what AI might be capable of decades from now. It has made huge strides already. I would be wary of making any long range assumptions, as sensible as they seem. AI may indeed reach it’s own consciousness, and sooner than we expect. We may be obsoleting ourselves. That music will probably never sound human, but might be equal in a different way. How can a mass of electronics truly feel music? Oh by the way, can’t you just once use a more modest picture of the lady? Too much to ask?
https://basiaconfuoco.com/2021/06/21/khatia-buniatishvili-the-worlds-most-glamorous-pianist/
The worry that AI will take over the world is as unrealistic as the conspiracy that Bill Gates has subverted 5G to control our brains – neither technology is anywhere near doing what it’s supposed to, let alone anything more. Just try asking Alexa to play a piece of classical music for the current state of the art – or ride in an “autonomous” car, or read a piece of auto-generated text.
Do you think that AI will play more beautifully than humans? This is a ridiculous question. Beauty is a personal, emotional response. Being able to respond emotionally makes us human. A machine cannot respond emotionally or feel anything. It can only calculate numerically. Therefore, it will never be able to compose music. AI may be able to play music better than us (as asked in the original question) i.e. without making mistakes, but so what? The problem for humans seems to be that we are increasingly trying to destroy ‘happy’ emotions. For example horror movies are the most popular of all movies these days. My solution to this problem is to remove all machines from our lives, unless it is a matter of life or death.
The fascinating part of this is that pianists have been aping/mimicking the perfection of recordings for seventy five years or so. AI just flips the script, but it amounts to the same thing, which is the merging of the human and the artificial in the quest for a fictive perfection. The creative act is an expressive act. Perfection is a dimension of craft which is essentially refinement acquired through repetition. Craft is a dimension of art but is NOT art!
Brilliant answer!
True, and moreover AI might not even be devoted to fictive perfection as much as fictive performances. If someone was so inclined AI could give us the Heifetz performance of the Schoenberg Violin Concerto that Heifetz himself was ready to do until Schoenberg reneged on part of the deal. Or the Fritz Kreisler performance of the Elgar Violin Concerto that for whatever reason HMV decided not to preserve, Maria Callas singing Wagner operas complete and in German, or Joseph Hassid in the great concertos and sonatas he never lived to record.
Some years ago there were efforts to “modernize” the recordings of Caruso by removing some of the most tell-tale attributes of the acoustic process, and re-did them in stereo with a modern full orchestra. But the sound engineers who did the work admitted they had the tools, even back then, to do much more with the voice and in theory make the voice sound like a modern stereo recording, as modern as Domingo. And that was all pre-AI, or at least it was AI in its infancy.
Just maybe Buniatishvili is being too hopeful here.
An interesting Blindfold test!
Is it Real or is it AI?
Compare recordings.
AI wouldn’t even Need a real Piano or an Orchestra.
Live would be another story.
While there are Digital Player Pianos,
there aren’t any Digital Player Orchestras,
Classical Singers, Rock Bands, Jazz Groups, etc,
that would pass muster except as bizarre Holograms or something like that.
A MOMA Installation.
It would seem the entire Recording Industry could be replaced.
All Profits, no Overhead.
You know, like Musicians’ Salaries.
The reason that AI is such a “threat” is that so many people do not actually engage with their music. Most will hear something and do no more than think “Like” or “Ignore”.
I think most people here will be able to listen (engage) with Beethoven’s fifth for the umpteenth time and derive some new insight whereas so many will hear “Da da da daaah” and think “Ooh, Beethoven, rah rah rah”
I suspect that the chances of gaining a new insight from the latest AI banger are pretty remote. I was going to say that I haven’t even had any new insights on “Yellow submarine” for 50 (ok, 48) years, but even there, there are some cultural etc points of interest as long as you don’t expect to, ahem, go too deep.
I expect AI will churn out palatable McTunes by the thousands at a pace just within the standard attention span.
Thanks Norman for keeping us abreast of A.I. classical news.
For many it already has – and the usual dillettantish arguments by insistence and authority, delivered with the usual lofty first-class-travel airs, are as unconvincing as the examples she’s using.
Interviewing musicians is basically the same as interving athletes, just change the background and the vocabulary slightly. They have nothing to say.
Sorry Khatia Buniatishvili, one day, AI will create your clones, thousands of you, mass produced, like Steinway pianos, and you will be in every home, playing Chopin as background music while your AI owners are having dinner.
It’s just a matter of time, evolutionary time.
As surely as homo sapiens replaced homo Neanderthalis, as surely as no homo sapien will ever win again a single game of chess or Go against a computer, AI will replace homosapiens.
The best we can hope for is AI is willing to breed with homo sapiens so that some part of homo sapien DNA will live on.
While there might be piano robots in the future, still that will never replace real art. Because real art needs the emotional interaction, the – at least imagined – empathetic connection between (at least) two humans, the artist and the recipient. If this is not happening, then it is not art. End of story.
Why is that important?
You’re wrong Chet. AI machines winning games of chess does not prove AI is better than humans; it proves we are better than AI – we created it, not vice versa. AI will be responsible for its own demise over the next few years because it has a fatal flaw – it cannot predict or speculate about the future. So it will systematically replace all the repetitive aspects of jobs and other human activities. This means that no jobs or other activities for humans will be possible, except for street cleaners, perhaps also footballers and the like. This is what will kill AI. Thriving economies depend on wealthy humans spending their earnings. Just my humble opinion.
Steinway already has a player piano (“Spirio”) that can record and play back all ‘Steinway Artists’ as if they were playing in your house. However for me, seeing the artist is just as important as hearing them, so I would never buy a player piano.
Bocelli played a concert with a robot conductor the other night, blind leading the blind?