Overview

The Uncanny Muse explores the history of automation in the arts and delves into one of the most momentous and controversial aspects of AI: artificial creativity. The adoption of technology and machinery has long transformed the world, but as the potential for artificial intelligence expands, David Hajdu examines the new, increasingly urgent questions about technology's role in culture. Hajdu traces the fascinating, varied ways in which inventors and artists have sought to emulate mental processes and mechanize creative production. For decades, machines and artists have engaged in expressing the human condition--along with the condition of living with machines--through player pianos, broadcasting technology, electric organs, digital movie effects, synthesizers, and motion capture. By communicating and informing human knowledge, the machines have exerted considerable influence on the history of art--and often more influence than humans have been willing to recognize. As Hajdu proclaims: ""before machine learning, there was machine teaching."" With thoughtful and surprising turns from Berry Gordy and George Harrison to Andy Warhol and Stevie Wonder, David Hajdu takes a novel and contrarian approach: he sees how machines through the ages have enabled creativity, not stifled it--and The Uncanny Muse sees no reason why this shouldn't be the case with AI today.

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David Hajdu is the author of seven books, including Adrianne Geffel: A Fiction, and a three-time National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. A musician and composer, he is the music critic for the Nation and a journalism professor at Columbia University. He lives in New York City. L. J. Ganser is an award-winning narrator with over 450 titles recorded to date. Prized for versatility, his projects range from preschool picture books to crime noir thrillers, from astronomical adventures (both science and sci-fi) to Arctic Circle high school basketball stories. His favorite titles include Jurassic Park, The Telling Room, Capital in the 21st Century, Talking to Crazy, and Missing Beauty. He lives in New York City with his family.

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