I'm a little skeptical about the role of snobbery in this. It's impossible to do a properly blinded experiment, because the folks with the necessary knowledge already are able to identify any Chopin (or Bach or Beethoven) piece, and thus know a priori which is the synthetic piece. This seems rather too similar to the story about winetasters (e.g., here, sorry for the cache link: http://74.125.93.132/search?q=cache:SB6S068de0gJ:www.latimes... )

Snobbery is not the right word, but you make a valid point.

I feel that the lack of the underlying complexity is what makes this almost beyond the ability of a human to create in that removing ourselves from patterns/meaning when creating art is incredibly difficult. And to some people the lack of meaning is the beauty. So I am not disagreeing with you - I was just inspired by your comment to think about what I like about music like this.

Yeah, that's what I found eerie about it! It's close but not quite Chopin.

Maybe the Bach and Joplin pieces didn't bother me so much because baroque counterpoints and piano rags are already kind of formulaic.

I'd love to hear (or maybe be creeped out by) their program trying some jazz greats. That's a style I'm much more familiar with.

I obviously can't promise this isn't my own bias, but the Joplin-eque piece just doesn't flow the same as any of the actual Joplin rags I'm familiar with. Same with the Bach. There's something compelling in the originals that seems to be missing from the ersatz version.