“There is a road that must be crossed, by Google and also by the rest of us. On one side is a digital world with its largely familiar structure, fuelled by familiar kinds of advertising, in many of whose forms Google excels. To make liveable whatever lies on the other side of the road requires that we confront some challenges. One is to avoid an overreliance on self-contained systems trained on whatever text, speech, images, audio and video are digitally available – inevitably both a biased subset of what human beings are able to produce and an impoverished version of what human knowledge consists in. Another challenge is to unlearn scale. Much of the success of LLMs has come simply from making everything bigger: the number of parameters they contain, the quantity of data employed to train them, the size and energy intensity of the data centres in which they run. That trajectory is unsustainable, and not just environmentally: it’s getting harder to find adequate volumes of fresh data on which to train new models, since much of what exists is already potentially compromised by having been generated by previous models. It’s going to be a hard road to cross. Can we navigate it successfully?”
“Do Spotify listeners care if their music is ‘humanized’? With the mainstreaming of A.I., songs of passable quality can be generated instantly and infinitely; their frictionless mass production, combined with their distribution on algorithmic feeds, means that A.I.-generated music acts a lot like any other kind of social content online. The music’s quality or durability is secondary to its ephemeral impact; the goal is a clickability for the ears.”
“The player should discover the work anew in each performance, and make the listener feel the full wonderment of that discovery. I have been to many such concerts. Each has included wrong notes, or other events that the performer might rue the next day; each has been exhilarating, consciousness-altering. I have been to many more concerts where I felt that the player’s primary goal was to avoid mishaps, to play the piece exactly the way it went in the practice room the day before. I remember little to nothing.
You can hear the virtues of imperfection in a live recording of Alfred Cortot playing Chopin’s Preludes, Op. 28. Four measures into the first prelude, his fingers have already landed on several wrong keys. The performance is riveting not despite the wrong notes but because he was willing to risk them. Lose that element of risk, and you also lose the urgency and inexorability of Cortot’s performance, which gives us access to Chopin’s strange and turbulent world.”
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