The musical AI is now working on its debut album(s)--and wants to do the Beatles better than the Beatles

Researchers at Sony's computer science laboratory in Paris recently put out a set of pop songs composed by an AI system, which scans songs from a database to compose entirely new pieces in certain musical styles. The final results were, unexpectedly, fairly catchy tunes. Expanding that idea, Sony CSL now wants to use its system of machine-learning algorithms--which is named Flow Machines, and has been in development since 2012--to write and publish entire albums. Using an algorithm to write songs "makes all the elements of experimentation easier, which otherwise would have been too time-consuming or meticulous," says the lab's director and artificial intelligence expert François Pashet. Does a music-making AI violate the intimacy and emotion of the songwriting process?