AI-Generated Music and Extrinsic Final Value

Some objects are valued for their own sakes in virtue of the relations they bear to other things rather than merely as means. Princess Diana’s dress is a familiar example. It is admired, preserved, exhibited, and sold for large sums because Diana wore it. Its value is final rather than instrumental, yet extrinsic rather than intrinsic—a paradigmatic case of extrinsic final value. This category initially seems well suited to understanding certain contested contemporary artifacts, including AI-generated music. The viral AI-generated song Heart on My Sleeve, released in April 2023, features original lyrics and music but is composed in a style recognizably continuous with the work of Drake and The Weeknd. Its rapid circulation provoked intense debates about authorship, entitlement, appropriation, and exploitation, alongside moral concerns about “digital blackface” and the extraction of cultural and economic value from Black artists’ voices and styles. These disputes presuppose a substantive evaluative claim: that Heart on My Sleeve matters for its own sake in virtue of its relation to the artists it emulates. Without that assumption, claims about entitlement or exploitation lose much of their force. This is why extrinsic final value initially appears to offer a promising framework for understanding the case. Yet existing theories of extrinsic final value cannot explain why the dependence on relations takes such different forms in these two cases. While accounts such as Korsgaard’s and Rabinowicz and Rønnow-Rasmussen’s can classify both Diana’s dress and Heart on My Sleeve as instances of extrinsic final value, they treat them as normatively equivalent. In the case of the dress, an extrinsic historical relation—being worn by Diana—functions directly as the value-making feature. In the case of the song, by contrast, what seems to matter are intrinsic musical features—its beat, production, and vocal style—but these features matter only because of their relation to another body of work. Existing accounts lack the resources to explain this structural difference. Developing an account that can capture it is the task of this paper. Drawing on Kant’s analysis of objective purposiveness and judgments of perfection in the Critique of the Power of Judgment, I argue that extrinsic final value can be realized in two distinct ways. In the first, an object is valuable for its own sake in virtue of an extrinsic property that itself functions as the value-making feature, as with Diana’s dress. In the second, an object is valuable for its own sake in virtue of intrinsic properties whose evaluative significance is fixed only by reference to a distinct evaluative kind to which the object does not itself belong, as in the case of Heart on My Sleeve. In the former, an extrinsic relation itself makes the object valuable; in the latter, an extrinsic relation explains why certain intrinsic features count as value-making at all.