When the Beatles were in their hey day, about 30% of the top 100 billboard songs had a key change. And today there were many deck many years of the last 10 where it was zero. There was a single song in the top 100 with a key change this year. The cost of that is you're seeing less kind of musical harmonic innovation and flattening of emotional effect as well.
When OpenAI launched its conversational chatbot this past November, author Ian Leslie was struck by the humanness of the computer's dialogue. Then he realized that he had it exactly backward: In an age that favors the formulaic and generic to the ambiguous, complex, and unexpected, it's no wonder that computers can sound eerily lifelike. Leslie tells EconTalk host Russ Roberts that we should worry less about the lifelike nature of AI and worry more that human beings are being more robotic and predictable. Leslie bolsters his argument with evidence from music and movies. The conversation includes a discussion of the role of education in wearing down the mind's rougher, but more interesting and more authentic, edges as well as how we might strive to be more human in the age of AI.