Susan Cain

If you play me some tune of any genre that just sounds...

I don't know that I care.

Like if you then pull back the curtain and tell me that this is pure AI confection, it's possible I'll still like it better than the human product because on some level music is doing something different for me.

It's a little bit like the difference between art and music.

interior decorating.

Like, you know, if you tell me that couch, the color of the couch is what it is, and I don't care how it got there, right?

It's either a couch I love the look of or not.

It's either comfortable or I'm not.

But if you tell me that, you know, we just found the perfect fabric and the perfect color, and it's all made by robots, you know, on some level, I just care about the object itself and not how it got there.

So that's such a perfect analogy.

It's a very Philistine analogy.

All the musicians are horrified that I went that far down the hierarchy of mattering, but yeah.

I don't actually feel that way about it.

So, okay, what you just said, I would feel if I were, you know,

Out at a restaurant and there's great background music playing.

I don't care in that context who wrote the music or where it came from.

But actually, the whole reason that I wrote Bittersweet, my last book, was because I have had all my life this incredibly intense, euphoric slash ecstatic reaction to certain forms of minor key, sad music.

And I was just trying to figure out where on earth did that come from?

Have you experimented with trying to produce AI minor key sad music?

No, but I think I would have the same reaction to it that I have when I start reading the social media story and then realize it's AI and stop reading.