The Problem of Musical Creativity and its Relevance for Ethical and Legal Decisions towards Musical AI

Because of its non-representational nature, music has always had familiarity with computational and algorithmic methodologies for automatic composition and performance. Today, AI and computer technology are transforming systems of automatic music production from passive means within musical creative processes into ever more autonomous active collaborators of human musicians. This raises a large number of interrelated questions both about the theoretical problems of artificial musical creativity and about its ethical consequences. Considering two of the most urgent ethical problems of Musical AI (music job replacement and machine musical authorship), we show in this essay the strict dependence of every form of acknowledgment of a moral and legal status to systems of automatic music production from the theoretical account of musical creativity by turns implicitly or explicitly adopted, arguing, on the basis of pragmatic reasons, for the necessity and the desirability of this acknowledgment.