It used to be you could spend an afternoon drumming up a home movie with your little sister, soundtrack it with your favorite mixtape cuts, and upload it to the Internet for sharing without a care. What's an amateur-at-best musician to do? I may have marched on a collegiate snare line (and therefore understand rhythm, phrasings, and tempo), but my ability to create melody probably stopped with middle school recorder lessons. Luckily, we musically challenged filmmakers and podcasters now have robots. A number of high-profile AI composition initiatives have surfaced in recent years--perhaps most notably, Sony's Flow Machine released its debut album in January--and slowly but surely these tools are moving from the research labs and professional production studios into publicly available spaces.

Machine learning and artificial intelligence are so difficult to understand, only a few very smart computer scientists know how to build them. But the designers of a new tool have a big ambition: to create the Javascript for AI. The tool, called Cortex, uses a graphical user interface to make it so that building an AI model doesn't require a PhD. The honeycomb-like interface, designed by Mark Rolston of Argodesign, enables developers–and even designers–to use premade AI "skills," as Rolston describes them, that can do things like sentiment analysis or natural language processing. They can then drag and drop these skills into an interface that shows the progression of the model.