Doug Eck, research scientist leading Google's Magenta project, discusses the challenge of evaluating generative AI music models.
Opinion
Eck: Alex Graves advanced LSTMs more than anyone, including its creator
“Among the three of us, by far, Alex Graves has done the most with LSTM. So he continued, after he finished his PhD, and he continued doggedly to try to understand how recurrent neural networks worked, how to train them, and how to make them useful for sequence…”
Assertion Supported
Eck: Untrained listeners rated Magenta compositions as more Bach-like than Bach
“When we put these tunes out for, like, untrained listeners to listen to, they sometimes voted them as sounding more Bach-y”
Assertion Supported
Eck: As of 2017, AI cannot generate a single coherent text paragraph
“So, so everybody understands that's listening or watching, you know, we can, we can't generate a coherent paragraph, right? So, I don't mean we, magenta. I mean, kind of we, humanity.”
Disclosure
Eck: Magenta aims to build creative tools, not act as artists
“The reason that I put that quote there, I think, is to be honest with the division between engineering and research and artistry, and to not think that what I'm doing is being a machine learning artist, but we're trying to build interesting ways to make new ki…”
Insight
Eck: Users' first instinct with AI art models is breaking them
“The first thing you're gonna do, if you think, if someone comes to you and says, here's this really smart model that you can make art with, what are you gonna do? You're gonna try to show the world that it's a stupid model, right? But maybe the way that, maybe…”
Insight
Eck: Audio model generation errors sound musical because of learned training variance
“I think they're interesting because the model has been forced to capture some of the important sources of variance in real music audio, and even when it Fails to reproduce all of them when it fills in with confusion, so to speak. Even that confusion is, is som…”