Two Reasons

What AI music and a South Korean former professional Go player have in common.

Have you ever listened to AI-generated music?

The first iterations of it weren’t very impressive, but now, it’s mind-blowing.

If you’re a fan of 90s Rap/Hip-Hop, listen to this (p.s. I can’t promise that the link will stay active forever, from my experience these songs don’t always stick around).

I have listened to many, many hours of AI-generated music. They are all covers.

Some versions are so good that I like them slightly better than the originals.

A strange thing started happening to me once I listened past a certain number of hours.

I started to notice that the music sounded ... perfect.

Too perfect.

More specifically, it was the vocals that put me over the edge.

There were some lines from some songs that were sung in such a way that I knew only a machine can do that.

This made me realize something that I had been taking for granted in all my years of loving music.

Human vocals are imperfect, because human beings are imperfect.

I love that about us. Don’t you?

**

Lee Sedol is a South Korean former professional Go player, and is one of the main characters of the 2017 documentary, AlphaGo.

The documentary is available for free on YouTube and it is entirely worth an hour and a half of your time. I have watched it several times.

It’s about a machine versus a human in an ancient game. The machine is a computer program developed by Google DeepMind, the human is Lee Sedol, and the game is Go.

The dramatic showdown between these two takes place over five games. I am not going to spoil the outcome for you, but I am going to mention one particular point that happens in game 4 (If you want to jump to the start of game 4, it’s at 1:03:55 in the documentary).

In game 4, Lee Sedol plays a move that data scientists later calculate to be a 1 in 10,000 move. The people in the documentary literally call it a “God move.”

In that one move, you could argue that Lee Sedol, a human being, was perfect.

Again, without trying to give away too much, the aftermath of that move had people in tears. Me included.

It felt like we were crying because Lee Sedol showed us that, with all our imperfections, human beings can also be perfect.

I love that about us too. Don’t you?