James O'Donnell

"The model doesn’t deserve all the credit here; these outputs could not have been created without the work of human artists whose work was in the training data. 

"But with just a few prompts, the model generated songs that few people would pick out as machine-made. 

"A few could easily have been played at a party without raising objections, and I found two I genuinely loved, even as a lifelong musician and generally picky music person. 

"But sounding real is not the same thing as sounding original. The songs did not feel driven by oddities or anomalies —certainly not on the level of Beethoven’s jump scare. Nor did they seem to bend genres or cover great leaps between themes. 

"In my test, people sometimes struggled to decide whether a song was AI-generated or simply bad. 

"Sanchez says people may wonder who is behind the music. But 'at the end of the day, however much AI component, however much human component, it’s going to be art,' he says. 'And people are going to react to it on the quality of its aesthetic merits.'

"In my experiment, though, I saw that the question really mattered to people —and some vehemently resisted the idea of enjoying music made by a computer model. 

"When one of my test subjects instinctively started bobbing her head to an electro-pop song on the quiz, her face expressed doubt. It was almost as if she was trying her best to picture a human rather than a machine as the song’s composer. 'Man,” she said, 'I really hope this isn’t AI'."