The Top 100 Songs Aren't All That Complex.

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There's still plenty of creative people doing creative things because of technology and distribution the way it's set up now there are songs on Spotify that are fabulously creative. But you're algorithm very often and you gotta make it harder for people to find them. I seems huge amount more than ever in terms of, you know, just cheer volume. The average quality of our kind of popular songs is well, if not gone down, it's become kind of simpler and less emotionally complex.

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.