Love is a mysterious thing.

Love’s ability to enflame our souls and defy self-preservation makes it altogether unnatural. And yet its capacity to wax and wane without rhyme or reason makes it wholly alive.

Being alive among us in forms from perverse and abusive to giving and good reveals an agnostic depth of power unlike any other. And yet, when we feel it, we know it stronger than any truth and experience it as the apex of our lives.

It is perfect only unto itself, perfectly imperfectly-fitting to our imperfect selves, and entirely above formality.

It is commendable that natural science does not even attempt to distinguish between love and the concoction of simple physiochemical reactions and drives related to procreation. It is only holy scripture and art that make any sense of the matter, albeit still nearly incomprehensible.

Art’s ability to approach something (love) that only scripture otherwise can makes art, in my view, holy. And since we create art, it is, in my view, our holy human superpower. As covered in previous Musings, artificial intelligence, with its exclusively naturalistic definitions, stands opposite love, with its informality, aliveness, purposelessness, etc.

It seems that the only real space that they share is the spectrum of alignment.

Therefore, artfulness could be considered the needle that marks where, on the spectrum between love and artificial intelligence—the opposing ends—a given piece of art may be judged.

The great challenge of making great art together with artificial intelligence(s) arises from this tension: its addition [to the workflow(s)] pulls art away from love and therefore is adversarial to artistic intent. Artists were quick to understand this nature of AI. To be fair to my fellow coders, who are the first power users of AI, the business and technical uses have no such drawbacks whatsoever in those and other unartistic domains.

Creating “humane musical intelligence” should be seen now as no easy feat.

Our research and the products we make—at least the foundational tools—must be omnipresent and invisible, omnipotent yet subjugated, and empower human artists who use Music Maketh to express their art alongside not an adversary but an ally.