Long time lurker, first time poster here.
As an individual who makes a modest living mainly through animation and music video work with some music on the side I have to say I'm utterly terrified and looking at my career in tatters just as it's begun (I'm a 32 year old music graduate living in the UK). I agree that we've had a slow and steady democratisation of artistic production for the last few hundred years and the barriers to entry have become lower and lower, however this is not democratisation, this is a complete de-skilling of the entire landscape. Skills i've honed for 20 years have just been made almost entirely redundant overnight. I don't believe that anyone owes me a living but lots of independent artists like me who were already only earning just enough to keep a roof over my head but did it for the love are now going to face some very difficult choices.
I agree with you that the musical landscape has churned out a lot of garbage in the last 25 years, but the entire artistic ecosystem is about to be rocked to its core.. there will be plenty of winners but also a lot of losers, and I suspect it will be artists outside the mainstream that suffer the most. The music and artistic works that we all love are intrinsically linked to the concept of authorship, a concept which may be about to be nuked off the face of the earth.
It's not just the creatives either, I think plenty of service and administrative jobs are going to be wiped off the map too and we are heading for a bumpy ride as the human race works out how the hell we organise the world when the human brain becomes surplus to requirements.
Yes, it's going to be, um, "interesting".
There is a lot to be worried about (but I don't like spending my time worrying). A little be like the threat of everyone being replaced by robots, except far further reaching and much, much faster (building and installation of robots is more limited by time and money). And AI can make better AI.
If I were to worry, I'd worry most about what will surely be reliance, and the fact it will never truly understand what "correct" is. You could say the same about people, but we never put all our trust in one person.
What I mean is...AI, today, seems like an expert in many technology subjects, for instance. It could tell you many things about digital audio, for instance, today. And to people who don't know, or know a fair amount, it seems like it knows everything about it. But if you ask it something about an expertise that you're intimately familiar with, say, better than 99% of the planet, it's painfully obvious it's just parroting what it's read from many sources. It's got the basic idea right, enough to convince the vast majority of people, but it doesn't really understand.
Well, it won't be long till it's convincing to 99.99% of people on an important subject. Yet still not really understand. But 9999 out of 10000 people would say it's the expert, no human can know and readily access that much knowledge, and have reason to ignore that one other person who knows something is wrong. That's what's scary to me, inevitable reliance. And that's even before we get to the fact it can be created with bias. (Famously, Google Gemini, which displayed a black Nazi when asked to show a German soldier of WWII, obviously in the interest of inclusion, one of its prime directives.)
Right now it's amazing. Yet sometime silly stupid. My friend posed that a symphony takes 60 minutes to play with a 100-piece orchestra, and asked how long it would be with a 200 piece orchestra. Chat GPT explained in clear terms why it would take 30 minutes. The key is that it doesn't know what music is, but it knows that more workers shorten the time to do a task.
Yesterday, I was playing with Suno singing my lyrics. I ran out of songs to try, and wanted to see what it did with one not yet developed. I had two verses, so asked Chat GPT to give me chorus to extend it a bit. I didn't care about the words, but it gave me AABB rhyme. I asked for an alternate, and got the same pattern. I asked if it could give me one in ABAB, it said sure, and gave me another AABB, except it labeled the lines as ABAB. I asked it to rhyme every other line, it said sure, here's one in ABAB, yet gave me one in AABB. I asked it to give another rhyme style, it was AABB. I asked it to try still another style, it said, sure, here's ABCB, giving one in AABB.
But at work, there was an issue that a colleague had posed on slack, and someone gave him a 2000+ character rambling paragraph in response. The colleague showed it to me, and I put it into Copilot, which stripped out the rambling redundancy and summarized it very well, breaking it into clear bullet points. It's really good at restating things, and you can prompt it for style and format. It will be used extensively in emails to customers and the like. Also things like creating charts and such. Business are embracing AI for productivity. At least that aspect won't so much replace people as it will increase productivity.
