I think it will take many more years until an AI is able to compose like e.g. John Williams and play a score and sound like e.g. the London Symphony Orchestra. So there is room left for human contribution. On the other hand, the majority of humans even before AI was not able to value good vs. bad musical composition and performance, and instead satisfied with the commercial slop the market was flooded over the last thirty years. Studies of e.g. Spotify consumer behaviour demonstrated for many years before AI that more and more people consume anonymous playlists never caring who composed or played the music, just using music for its functional purpose like a commodity. It's depressing, but that's how society develops.
> a curiosity, someone who does things the hard way for their own amusement
That development already started long ago. In the eighties and nineties, music schools florished and children wanted to learn instruments and play in bands or orchestras. That completely changed over the last thirty years. Musical instruments will be a curiosity in a decade or two people are going to watch in a museum, wondering why anyone would have learned these skills in the past.
Prayer for external effects has long been mechanized [1]. But praying for your inner effect is a different thing. Similarly, production of songs for external consumption is being mechanized. But what you feel when you sing cannot be mechanized. Sing for yourself, play for yourself and for those immediately around you in the moment. It's as valuable as ever.
Figure out how to stand on the shoulders of giants like any of your predecessors of note.
I didn't even mention anything about economic impacts, jobs, money. It's truer to say my reply is "they destroyed what it is to be human".
Does this really not bother you at all?
It becomes harder to find and therefore listen to music you like when every avenue of discovering music is drowned out with 1000 AI-generated songs for every 1 human-made song.
> people who want to make money,
Is it such a bad thing to want to be able to pursue your creativity full-time? For creative fields that require thousands of hours of practice to achieve results other people will enjoy, should we reserve such skilled expression only to those born wealthy enough to not need to work?
Creative expression and consumption of media are different questions. You are right about that, but that's a separate issue.
> Is it such a bad thing to want to be able to pursue your creativity full-time? For creative fields that require thousands of hours of practice to achieve results other people will enjoy, should we reserve such skilled expression only to those born wealthy enough to not need to work?
Welcome to capitalism, enjoy your stay. And if you dont like it, you can always wait for the coming times when informational work is completely automated, which means that traditional social mobility completely disappears, and capital is locked/frozen forever and we will have serfdom instead. So I would recommend you enjoy the present.
Makes no sense - why would anyone use humans as serfs when AI is there. I think everyone will have AI and probably robotic automations, they will all be cheap and accessible.
You have people pumping out an entire album in a few days simply because they can, repeatedly, and then they flood streaming services with their garbage. I forget which network it was but as of a few months ago, AI-generated submissions were at least half of all submissions.
I recently heard an anecdote about a family that finally found a podcast that they all enjoyed listening to on road trips...and only realised when they tried to find out more about the hosts that the whole thing was AI generated. Bam, another field of creative expression (and income!) destroyed.