Mr. Höttges, you had a computer finish writing Beethoven's 10th Symphony.

Do you like what Artificial Intelligence did with the unfinished work?

Bettina Weiguny

Freelance writer in the economy of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung.

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Yes.

Indeed.

I am enthusiastic about the passages with the character of a song, especially the quiet passages are very sensitive.

I hear Beethoven there, the handwriting is recognizable.

Experts have to decide whether that comes close to the composer.

The work will be premiered this weekend, played by the Beethoven Orchestra in Bonn.

What kind of reactions do you expect?

Nothing would be nicer than a scandal, then it would at least have moved people.

Beethoven was also panned out many times.

There will certainly be critical voices who say: Beethoven was better!

Perhaps we all bow down to the genius Beethoven even more deeply.

And what does Telekom, as a commercial enterprise, expect from the experiment?

We want people to lose their fear of contact with technology.

This is not only relevant for us externally, but also internally.

AI helps us discover errors in the system.

We have 260 million customers; problems can arise anywhere that employees cannot solve on their own.

That is why there is a mass of technology behind every human contact with customers.

All internal processes, these manual paper battles, are automated.

Everything we do is based on a tsunami of digitization.

We at Telekom are right in the middle of it all.

That is why AI is one of the keys to using data intelligently and automatically processing it.

The interaction between musicians and AI should clearly demonstrate that?

It shows how man and machine work together to create something beautiful.

We have also fed the program with music by Beethoven, his contemporaries and older music.

Beethoven is inconceivable without Bach.

The system has learned all of this, has further developed the elements and designed machine-creative forms.

And?

Can the computer be creative?

The first attempts at walking were disappointing.

We heard music, but not Beethoven.

The machine learned that little by little.

It's like with pictures: it is difficult for a computer to decide what is a dog and what is a blanket.

But Beethoven, too, tore up and reworked his scores an infinite number of times.

As soon as I give a speech, I rewrite it ten times until what I want to say is there.

That's totally normal.

Could it be that you want to distract attention from your own problems with the beautiful PR project?

The project is a contribution to the examination of the relationship between man and machine, an important social debate.

Our brain has not received an update in 50,000 years.

The AI ​​is now taking us by leaps and bounds.

I think that's great.

And what problems should Telekom distract from?

Your new major shareholder Softbank has just sold a block of shares worth 1.5 billion euros.

Why?

The statement is not true.

Softbank has not sold any shares, it is and will remain the second largest investor.

Let's wait and see if the stock recovers.

The expansion of the network remains a construction site.