2024/03/14 by Oliver Bown · 1 voice
Computer Science · Neuroscience · #Aesthetic Perception and Analysis #Music Technology and Sound Studies
paper · doi:10.1080/09298215.2024.2442360
openalex publication_date 2024/03/14 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01
There are, at present, multiple fronts of debate about the ethics of Commercial Creative AI (ComCAI) product development. The issues of copyright and the right to know the AI provenance of work are dominant and well-defined. Meanwhile, a significant area of debate is trickier to define and analyse, relating to ComCAI's impact on the intrinsic values and virtues of human creative endeavour. In this paper, I analyse this impact by surveying the emerging landscape of user interfaces (UIs) in the domain of commercial music AI products. I do this through a value-centred design lens, considering how it is possible to articulate intrinsic values in the arts. Specifically, I select two artistic objectives: the need for creative artists to create works that are differentiated from others; the need for deep cognitive creative engagement with the work being created. I ask how ComCAI UIs can enable these artistic objectives, first through a survey of UI types and their combination in products, second through user feature requests. This design analysis tentatively suggests that those ComCAI tools promising to support artists increasingly need to provide greater control, in order to satisfy their creative users, and this is focussed towards either simply allowing post-generation editing, or improving generative control, which is in tension with the opaque nature of the generative systems. I propose that a value-centred design approach that highlights values such as differentiation and creative engagement helps to identify under-explored design spaces which have the potential to make better music AI experiences.