Ai Composer Bias: Listeners Like Music Less When They Think It Was Composed by an Ai

Abstract

The use of artificial intelligence (AI) to compose music is becoming mainstream. Yet, there is a concern that listeners may have biases against AIs. Here, we test the hypothesis that listeners will like music less if they think it was composed by an AI. In Study 1, participants listened to excerpts of electronic and classical music and rated how much they liked the excerpts and whether they thought they were composed by an AI or human. Participants were more likely to attribute an AI composer to electronic music and liked music less that they thought was composed by an AI. In Study 2, we directly manipulated composer identity by telling participants that the music they heard (electronic music) was composed by an AI or by a human, yet we found no effect of composer identity on liking. We hypothesized that this was due to the "AI-sounding" nature of electronic music. Therefore, in Study 3, we used a set of "human-sounding" classical music excerpts. Here, participants liked the music less when it was purportedly composed by an AI. We conclude with implications of the AI composer bias for understanding perception of AIs in arts and aesthetic processing theories more broadly.

Department(s)

Psychological Science

Comments

Intelligent Systems Center, Grant None

Keywords and Phrases

Aesthetics; Algorithms; Artificial intelligence; Liking; Music

International Standard Serial Number (ISSN)

1076-898X

Document Type

Article - Journal

Document Version

Citation

File Type

text

Language(s)

English

Rights

© 2023 American Psychological Association, All rights reserved.

Publication Date

01 Jan 2022

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