(July 28, 2012) Computer
algorithms have started to write news stories, compose music, and pick hits.
In 2004,
New Zealander Ben Novak was just a guy with a couple of guitars and distant
dreams of becoming a pop star. A year later one of Novak's songs, Turn Your Car
Around, had invaded Europe's radio stations, becoming a top-10 hit.
Novak had
to beat long odds to get discovered. The process record labels use to find new
talent—A&R, for "artists and repertoire"—is fickle and hard to
explain; it rarely admits unknowns like him. So Novak got into the music
business through a back door that had been opened not by a human, but by an
algorithm tasked with finding hit songs.
But now we’re learning
that for some creative work, that simply isn’t true. Complex algorithms are
moving into creative fields—even those as nebulous as music A&R—and proving
that in some of these pursuits, humans can be displaced.
It’s widely accepted that
creativity can’t be copied by machines. Reinforcing these assumptions are
hundreds of books and studies that have attempted to explain creativity as the
product of mysterious processes within the right side of the human brain.
Creativity, the thinking has been, proves just how different people are from
CPUs.