Could a computer ever rival Rembrandt or Beethoven?

"But AI has no internal world and it has no need to create its desires or fears." So rather than letting AI take complete control, results seem to be far more fruitful when human artists work hand-in-hand with machines. Musician and University of Sussex lecturer Dr Alice Eldridge suggests that we should treat AI as "just another tool that we have designed, like the wheel, or the combustion engine". She has helped create a cello that uses a combination of acoustics, electrification and an adaptive algorithm that makes the instrument self-resonate; or essentially, play itself. "With a classical cello you have to bring the instrument alive with a bow; a feedback cello is already singing, your job as a performer is to shape the sound - it's more like a dance than'controlling' an instrument in the traditional way," she says.