Building God is a work that considers the increasing intersection of artificial intelligence and humanity. The title is taken from a comment made by journalist Casey Newton on an episode of the tech podcast, “Hard Fork.”
What does it mean to be a human in a time when generative AI programs, such as ChatGPT or Google Bard, are forcing us to grapple with accelerated technological progress? In 2024, scientists have argued that generative AI has now passed the Turing test – an evolving test proposed by the British scientist Alan Turing in 1950 to measure whether humans can tell if machines (computers) are conversing or if other humans are. Essentially, the test is a proxy to determine if machines are exhibiting true intelligence.
Now that we seem to have blown past the general Turing test milestone, what remains for us to distinguish ourselves from machines? I maintain that the existence and activation of our emotional neuroscientific networks and the act of feeling an aesthetic experience are two clear distinctions. These shared experiences that all humans have significantly comprise the human spirit. This work aims to celebrate that spirit.
To begin the compositional process, I typed something like the following prompt into Microsoft’s generative AI chatbot, CoPilot:
Imagine you’re a composer. Generate a five-note melody, using pitch names, that captures the sense of hesitancy, concern, and confusion that humans may be experiencing as generative AI increasingly seems to be able to demonstrate human-like abilities.
The chatbot replied with this:
That’s an interesting and challenging request. I will try to generate a random five-note melody using pitch names that captures the uncertainty humans might be feeling around making AI too powerful. Here is one possible melody:
B 4 F# 5 G 5 D 5 A 4
This melody uses the pitch class {B, D, F#, G, A}, which is derived from the formula 3-2-2-3. This pitch class has some dissonant intervals, such as the tritone between B and F#, and the minor second between F# and G, which create a sense of tension and unease. The melody also has a descending contour, which could suggest a feeling of decline or loss. The melody ends on A, which is not the tonic of the pitch class, leaving the listener with a sense of unresolvedness and ambiguity. Of course, this is just one possible interpretation of the melody, and different listeners may have different reactions to it. You can also try to create your own melodies using different pitch classes and formulas, and see how they convey different emotions and moods. 😊
[Note the smiley face is original to the chatbot’s response!]
Disregarding the musical error the chatbot made – mislabeling the B-F# interval as a tritone – this isn’t really a melody. It’s a collection of notes without any other musical information such as rhythm, octave/range, or other musical organization. Musicians in the Western tradition have more or less been using these same twelve pitch classes since equal temperament tuning started to become more commonplace in the early 16th century. At least at the time of the composition of this piece, the organization, craft, and musicality put into those five notes to create a full-blown musical work is something only a human can do.
The work is structured as a journey from artificially generated compositional material toward a more human musical experience. The five note motive, heard first out of time at the beginning of the work, is slowly transformed through the first half of the piece into something more deep, more filled with human emotion, searching, and finally, celebration. The mixed meters and challenging rhythms underpinning the explosive gestures give way to long phrasing and more recognizable musical structure. The human collaboration between the three performers overcomes the mathematical organization of the beginning to lead us into contemplation of beauty and the human spirit, showing us that computers have not yet passed the Turing test for musical composition.
Building God was commissioned by the Texas Music Teachers Association.