Stats for nerds
3recommend
5mentions
5people
2022–2026years
60% recommend40% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- > Making music is hard, especially when you’re a beginner. But does that fact justify using AI to do it? In general, hardship is a reason to skip an activity only if that activity doesn’t have some other value that compensates for the hardship. For example, the effort involved in hiking to the top of a mountain is a reason to take the cable car only if hiking to the top doesn’t have a value that compensates for the effort. And so, using AI to make music only makes sense if music-making has no value that compensates for the hardship involved in learning to do it.
> Thus, the promotion of AI music-generation software tacitly construes music-making as what I’ll call a “purely telic” activity. (I’m drawing on the MIT philosopher Kieran Setiya’s discussion of “telic” activities here, telos as in “end” or “goal”, in his excellent book Midlife.) A purely telic activity is one directed at a terminal state of having done something (the “telic” part), where the activity has no value beyond that of achieving the terminal state (the “purely” part). Construed as a purely telic activity, music-making has no value over and above that of having produced a piece of music, and so the more efficiently you can get to that point, the better. AI music generators make perfect sense on this view. The problem, of course, is that the purely telic view of music-making is false. For a musician, the point of making music isn’t merely to end up having made a piece of music: the actual making is part of the point.
- I just got a new book on this subject: Midlife: A Philosophical Guide, by Kieran Setiya (https://www.amazon.co.uk/Midlife-Philosophical-Guide-Kieran-...). Not got too far into it, but I like it so far.
- I read the book Midlife: A Philosophical Guide by Kieran Setiya. I found it interesting and helpful.
https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691173931/mi...
- Anyone else wanting to search for the book "Midlife" -- it seems to be this one, by Kieran Setiya (full title: "Midlife: A Philosophical Guide"):
- I like this quote:
In this sense, Setiya believes, “Midlife” is about middle age, but middle age just represents a more acute stage of existential insecurity that is always present.
Makes me wonder, what does existential security look like, because the quote rings true.
