Beethoven’s 10th Symphony and the Jerky Notes of Ai

According to Hans Moravec, assistant faculty member at Carnegie Mellon University’s Institute for Robotics, measuring AI’s capability is often represented as a “landscape of human potential.” They represented AI potential in the form of rising sea levels, rapidly covering the landscape. of human potential. Human functions such as rote memorization and arithmetic were the first to be flooded by AI. Playing the Go game, speech recognition and language translation were considered mountains. But recently, AI has clearly outperformed humans in these areas as well. Tasks like driving is on the verge of mastering the AI. According to Moravec, the highest peaks AI can never conquer were creative skills, such as book writing and art creation. But with Beethoven’s 10th Symphony building up, it is quite clear that AI can perform almost every human activity to perfection, or even do it better than humans.

Beethoven’s Bonn Orchestra premiered the 10th Symphony on 9 October 2021. A casual look at the viewership of Beethoven’s 10th YouTube video revealed that 3 months after that debut performance, no more than 75,000 people had watched those recordings. When you consider that the viewership of other Beethoven Symphony videos is in the several million, the views received by the 10th Symphony look very small. Technically, the 10th Symphony composed by AI can be considered a functionally superior product. It used sounds from electric organs that were not in the actual Beethoven symphony, for example, because electric organs did not exist in the composer’s time. But despite its functional superiority, the 10th Symphony did not attract the attention of music lovers. Why is it like this?

Beethoven’s 10th Symphony is a reminder that creating an AI product that is functionally superior to human capabilities, but that is adopted and liked by human audiences, is a different ball game altogether. When music lovers are listening to a symphony, they are not just listening to the music. They are getting emotionally attached to the many stories related to that music. For example, there is a story that when Ludwig van Beethoven’s Magisterial 9th ​​Symphony premiered in 1824, the composer had to turn to see the audience cheering—he could not hear its loud applause. The knowledge that Beethoven was deaf when composing his final symphony adds a very different dimension to his appreciation of music that goes far beyond its functional quality.

Many in the AI ​​industry are driven by the belief that once a product is developed that can do a job better than a human, it is home and dry. This is similar to the ‘product-oriented’ belief that led manufacturers to the zenith of the industrial age: Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door. But soon, there will be many more manufacturers of good quality mousetraps. This is when the ‘marketing orientation’ comes and reminds the manufacturers of the need to create brands that have special appeal.

Creating a brand is quite different from creating a product. With a little effort, sweetened water with a little fizz can be made into a cola drink. This is just a product. Making it a brand with which consumers develop an emotional connection is an entirely different challenge. When we focus only on engineering a driverless car, one is only working from a product standpoint. To think from a brand point of view, has to put the end user at the center of it. So, when developing a driverless car, one has to think about what the end user is going to do now that he doesn’t need to drive. Read more, listen more music, sleep more? If so, how can a driverless car help improve these activities compared to existing cars? Also, what does the end user lose by using a driverless car? Today, there is so much prestige attached to being driven by a driver. How will autonomous vehicles create the same level of prestige?

The AI ​​industry does not have to wait for competing products to emerge in each category before developing a branding orientation. Realistically, AI product developers cannot say that the potential future consequences of their technology development, whether it is job loss or ethical dilemmas, are not their problem and that someone else is responsible for dealing with it. They have to start thinking about possible outcomes ahead of time, taking into account emotional factors, as do brand makers. To gain a broader perspective, AI teams must be made up of not only technology experts, but also behavioral science and design experts.

At this early stage of the AI ​​industry, the functional superiority of an AI product could be big news. But Beethoven’s 10th Symphony reminds us that an emotional connection with the end user is critical to success.

Undoubtedly, the future belongs to AI. Not an AI product, but an AI brand.

Biju Dominic is Chief Promoter, Fractal Analytics and President of Final Mile Consulting