I don't know about you guys, but I'm marking down August 3rd as the day AI started being reality. That music, aside from the definite touch of MIDI, sounded downright organic. Like something a man with a MIDI keyboard and a thirst for improvisation music would do. My mind is absolutely blown. I'll be the first to welcome our digital children with open arms.
We're still a long way away. While these new results are impressive, it's still basically a very complex markov chain. It doesn't understand anything about the emotional impact of the music it writes, nor how to tailor a piece to evoke a certain emotion in the listener. It's not an AI that we can ask to make a certain type of composition; there's no "Computer, write me a waltz! Write me a melody for this love song I wrote! Write me some spooky music!". It can only create based on what it's been trained on. And I suppose it's arguable that "creating based on what you've been trained on" is what humans do, too. But there's a lot more to creativity than that. The RNN that made this music is groundbreaking in its ability to discover and reproduce the structure of human music, but it isn't intelligent, and it's nowhere near AGI.
Arguably, though - a LOT of today's music is based on mathematics and statistics as to what is popular and such, with new elements only being introduced by artists not under the Big Labels (see Psy's Gangnam Style, Macklemore's Thrift Shop, Sia's works, so on). There isn't much, in a lot of music today, that takes into account the impact of what's written or how to involve any emotion beside "horny", "envious" and "what the fuck am I listening to". Yet we still consider it much human. And at any rate, I don't expect machines to be explicitly capable of taking into account human emotion into it's works, just like I don't expect human art to particularly appeal to them. However, the fact that it can be taught patterns of music means, to me, it can learn any state of logic - have a dynamic consideration of the world. And since very little things in human existence is not patterns, it means it can also learn that - language, mathematics, maybe even psychology and human behavior. And you're right - we ARE creating based on what we've been trained on, except that we have centuries, if not millenia, of training. And creativity, arguably, is merely recombining what already exists - the one who discovered the first instrument (which I suspect was some sort of flute) most likely was inspired by the wind in the trees. Then it was refined into a multi-tone instrument when we realized that different properties give different sounds. And hell, even today - most music has direct roots into a handful of genres. At least that's how I perceive creativity - intelligent, maybe subconscious, reconstruction of possibilities. At any rate, I'm not vouching for a human AGI - because that may be entirely impossible. But I fully expect us to have an AGI within 30 years. It will be completely unlike any intelligence we'll have seen, but it's impact will be as big as meeting extraterrestrials.