AI Has Been Creating Music and the Results Are...Weird

In late May, a small crowd at St. Dunstan's church in East London's Stepney district gathered for two hours of traditional Irish music. But this event was different; the tunes it featured were composed, in part, by an artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm, dubbed folk-rnn, a stark reminder of how cutting-edge AI is gradually permeating every aspect of human life and culture--even creativity. Developed by researchers at Kingston University and Queen Mary University of London, folk-rnn is one of numerous projects exploring the intersection of artificial intelligence and creative arts. Folk-rnn's performance was met with a mixture of fascination, awe, and consternation at seeing soulless machines conquering something widely considered to be the exclusive domain of human intelligence. But these expeditions are discovering new ways that man and machine can cooperate.