AI and the Spectrum of Permissibility
Yo-Yo Ma as a faker, the Air Guitar World Championship, AI as literary autotune, and more
In this essay, we’ll contemplate the ethics of fakery, beginning with some musical examples and then working towards the ethics of AI usage in written contexts. If you like what you see here, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Yo-Yo Ma was almost indisputably one of the greatest cellists who ever lived.
After a private audience with Steve Jobs, Jobs said that Ma’s playing was the best argument for the existence of God that he’d ever heard.
Would you be disturbed, then, if I told you that Yo-Yo Ma faked his performance of “Air and Simple Gifts” (a piece by John Williams) at the 2009 presidential inauguration of Barack Obama? Would it have made any difference to those watching to learn that it was an all an act? All that smiling and expressive playing was not really resulting in any sound?1
If you’re wondering why his performance is so convincing, it is because, obviously, Yo-Yo Ma is in reality an excellent cellist. The fakery was no secret, either, which makes you wonder if I should keep calling it “fakery” (I will keep calling it “fakery,” just to be provocative).
In an interview with NPR, Ma justified his fakery as follows:
I think - let me put it to you this way. If we had not done that, we would have had four and a half minutes of absolute disaster. Everything would have been out of tune. We would have had broken strings. Basically, you would have had a very poor, “American Idol “rendition of what, you know, what John Williams had created, which is a beautiful piece of music. And we really knew that our purpose there was to serve the moment just before the swearing-in of the president.
We learn that Ma used soap instead of resin on his bow to prevent any sound from coming out. And, apparently, a piano tech disengaged the keys from the piano hammers, too.
The pseudo-event of the presidential inauguration justified this “performance” (what some might call “miming,” not “faking”).2 But as Ma himself points out, conventionally it is totally acceptable to do something like this.
Let’s look at another example.
Air Guitar World Championships
Every year since 1996, crowds have been gathering at the Air Guitar World Championships in Oulu, Finland to watch others pretend they’re playing guitar.
