Pure machine authorship is impossible to imagine without an autonomy sufficient to pass the [Lovelace Test]. In a manner similar to that of Wolfgang von Kempelen’s famous chess-playing machine (often called “The Turk”), a purported automaton that convinced countless observers in the eighteenth and nineteenth century of the possibility of machine autonomy (Sussman 1999; Standage 2002), there may always be a human, or at least significant human knowledge, hiding inside the “creative” machine. Halpern supports this view, noting that “machine intelligence is really in the past: when a machine does something ‘intelligent,’ it is because some extraordinarily brilliant person or persons, sometime in the past, found a way to preserve some fragment of intelligent action in the form of an artifact” (Halpern 2006, p. 54). Such a perspective is applicable to many less “intelligent” but musically useful generative music systems.
— Ariza, Christopher. “The Interrogator as Critic: The Turing Test and the Evaluation of Generative Music Systems.” Computer Music Journal 33.2 (2009): 48-70.
