Ulysses Online with Thor Magnusson

Making Sense - Having Sense: On Concepts and Perceptions of Creative AI

Generative AI has entered our cultural practices with much force recently. People use it to write, think, discuss, get advice, even as tarot readers or oracles. Online systems can create realistic texts, images, videos and music that find their way as “content” on social media and other media channels. But there is an increased unease bubbling underneath this development: we find expressions of anger, offence and frustration as the artificial has begun to perform tasks that in our culture was seen as uniquely human: creativity.

In this talk I will report on my experience of running a research project called Intelligent Instruments, where we develop musical instruments with AI. I will explore how people engage with notions of agency, intentionality, and understanding of those systems, even their emotional expression, and frame it in the context of strong AI, the symbol grounding problem and recent developments of embodied AI.

Speaker bio:

Thor Magnusson is a Research Professor at the University of Iceland and a Professor in Future Music at the University of Sussex. His work focuses on the impact digital technologies have on musical creativity and practice, explored through software development, composition and performance. In addition to theoretical work, he has developed audio software, systems of generative music composition, written computer music tutorials and created various musical live coding environments. 

Magnusson’s monograph Sonic Writing: The Technologies of Material, Symbolic and Signal Inscriptions has recently been published with Bloomsbury Academic (URL: https://www.bloomsbury.com/sonic-writing-9781501313868/ ). The book explores how contemporary music technologies trace their ancestry to previous forms of instruments and media, including symbolic musical notation. The book underpins current research where Magnusson is running a European Research Council funded project called “Intelligent Instruments” (see http://www.iil.is). Magnusson is also a co-author of the Live Coding: A Users’ Manual book published by MIT Press (https://livecodingbook.toplap.org)