Semiotics, Language, and Mind, No.2:
The Tacit Made Legible
My knowledge of the difference between the two pictures, just because it affects the relationship of the present to future lookings, informs the very character of my present looking.
—Nelson Goodman[1]
What’s really striking about AI poetry, prose, visual art, and music is not so much how impressively human-like they are, but how impressed we are by it.
—Philip Ball[2]
In October 2011 “Hello World!” a piece of contemporary classical music composed by Iamus — an artificial system designed to compose music — for violin-clarinet-piano trio was give its premiere at a musical festival in Spain. Not long after, other compositions by Iamus have been performed and recorded by the London Symphony Orchestra that produced two strikingly different verdicts. Tom Service from the Guardian who reviewed it knowing it was composed by Iamus found it grey and unmemorable — the work of a machine "slavishly manipulating pitch cells" — though he did pause to wonder whether he was "falling victim to a perceptual bias against a faceless computer program."[3] When a musicologist was asked to assess the same work from a recording but told nothing about its origin commented the music as “artistic and delightful.”[4] Their different reactions prompt one to ask how important is knowing about a work’s authorship in producing a verdict, and why? Could something very bad from an established, institutionally recognized artist still be better than a brilliantly executed work by someone unknown?
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