"On the other, you have the music of professional composers whose work has lasted hundreds of years. Telling them apart should be easy, right?"
Eh. I'm sure you can find mediocre/unremarkable snippets in the best novels. Why set the bar that low? There are a ton of Bach works that not even professional musicians have ever heard or played.
I'd love to see two changes:
1. Include the entire piece, not just a snippet of it. Sloppiness often manifests at the macro scale.
2. I found all of the snippets to be lousy and/or mediocre. There are a bunch of great but re... (read more)
Your experiment relied on unremarkable snippets, which are similar to random sentences or paragraphs in a book, and used people’s inability to distinguish them from equally short AI snippets as proof that AI generated musical works are good enough to fool the average person. I’d love to see the results to a similar experiment comparing whole works and using the best music human composers have to offer. The bar for the classical music version of the Turing test should be higher.