From Mariah Carey to Alan Walker, we've always had talented musicians bringing terrific tunes to our lives. But now they should watch out, as artificial intelligence (AI) is potentially going to start an industry battle with humans.

During the Computing Conference 2018 held by Alibaba in east China's Hangzhou City, we seemed to have met this "future musician."

What's the role of the AI musician?

Deng Junqi, algorithm expert of Alibaba Music, gave a demonstration on the process of machine composing to human's humming. At the scene, Deng hummed a melody into his phone, and just a few seconds after he clicked the "score" button, the system generated a song with the melody. 

"This function has already been put into use in Alibaba's Xiami music app," Deng said, "but it's still too far from what real AI should be by only producing a melody like this."

So, what's the real role of the AI musician at this stage in the music industry? Chen Yanqing, chief scientist of Alibaba Music, told CGTN that the real AI should be able to actively create melodies and chords, orchestrations and mastering, etc.

However, big music companies that flaunt the use of AI technology do not seem to have shown the ability to "actively create and mix-result," said Chen. Although Apple's creative apps Garage Band and Logic do have some intelligent functions for music composing, it's not deniable that it's actually based on a large music database of patterns. 

Even Amper Music, a website focused on AI-generated music with a huge popularity among enthusiasts, has not yet reached what Chen calls "artificial intelligence."

According to Chen, right now, the artificial intelligence "is just another source of inspiration for the musicians."

How does the AI musician work?

In a seminar focusing on technology and music, Dr. Gyorgy Fazekas from Queen Mary University of London demonstrated his research content and indicated that the reason why AI could create music could be that the machine has learned from a large amount of data of existing music pieces, or from what the programmer actually puts into the computer. "Actually human composers also just combine musical patterns or cliches or things that they know about, because they are culture to a particular musical style," Dr. Fazekas said, "now there are models of computational creativity as well."

So just as Dr. Fazekas said, the creative process of AI does not differentiate too much from humans; the main factor that will have an impact on the outcome quality is how much it actually learns.

He also mentioned that transfer learning, user interaction and adaptation could all be the challenges of AI-generated music at the moment, but originality would be the challenge that apply to listeners the most. 

How to protect copyright if AI is so smart?

No one can confirm that if AI musicians are able to exceed humans' abilities, not yet. But what we have to put into consideration is that how humans should protect the copyright of the works from the non-human creators.

The commercial AI-generated music website Amper Music has declared that it owns the copyright of all outcomes that were produced from the website, and it is for free to non-commercial users.

Chen said that the copyright should be co-owned by both of the platform of the software and the user who used the software to generate the music, however, he did not mention that if these "musicians" with the "subjective initiatives" could have their own rights just like humans. 

You probably don't know your idol is an AI

On August 31, 2017, the appearance of Hastune Miku, an animated female singer from Japan, amazed the whole world. Its cover of the local Helsinki Polkka "Levan Polkka," Hatsune Miku became one of the global idols. As it draws more and more attention, people have realized that their idol is actually a machine. 

By 2018, nearly 30 concerts were held for Hastune Miku and it has performed in more than 70 countries or regions, with 600 million fans worldwide. That's to say, Hastune Miku might be worth more than 10 billion Japanese yen. 

Is the threat real?

We can say that from the appearance of Hatsune Miku in as early as 2007, to the Spotify's scandal of creating "fake artists" in 2017, AI has caused more and more concerns that it will eventually kick human musicians out from the music industry. Regarding this, Deng did mention that Al will most likely replace humans when listening to a certain type of music. And Kazekas emphasized again that those AI musical applications would only assist the creative process, for instance, it will create a starting point and then a human composer can make it better. 

Although it is still unknown if AI will or will not replace human musicians altogether, we look forward to seeing more AI-generated elements in the music industry. And yet, we don't need to worry about the rise of real-life Ex Machina, at least not in the near future.