Unfinished: The Role of the Artist in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

For most of his career, the Emmy Award-winning composer and producer Lucas Cantor Santiago was a self-described luddite. Technology, he felt, was moving too fast, transforming the world and the arts with no regard for the cost in tradition, hard-won human wisdom, and tried-and-true methods of mastery.

That changed in 2019, however, when Cantor Santiago was commissioned by the Chinese firm Huawei, one of the largest technology companies on the planet, to "collaborate" with artificial intelligence and finish Franz Schubert's Unfinished Symphony. This successful experiment attracted attention throughout the world, including a segment on Today. Sparing no expense, Huawei has produced the "finished" symphony with a full orchestra several times around the globe.

Creating music in collaboration with a machine led Cantor Santiago to question his long-standing assumptions about what music is, what technology does, and how the two have evolved together since prehistoric musicians created the first bone flute. Today, music and the music business are changing so rapidly that both the art and the commercial empires surrounding it will be unrecognizable within a generation. Inevitably, these change will manifest in part as the erosion and disappearance of jobs and revenue streams for songwriters, composers, engineers, producers, and session musicians-the people who create the music that popular artists make famous. But it will also lead to the emergence of creative jobs that we cannot now imagine, and create new opportunities for human expression.

Drawing on Cantor Santiago's extensive experience in the arts and tech worlds and his ongoing experiments with AI-powered music composition and production, Unfinished is an engaging and refreshingly optimistic meditation on the role of technology in music and the arts. What is the current state of the art? How did we get here? Where do we go now? This book provides an informed perspective on what is lost but what we also gain when we bring our machines ever further into the creation of "art" in its many different forms.