Thank you for your well thought out, stimulating thoughts on this. I am sorry it took a while to get back to you on this, and it was really fun running into you in another thread. Writing this makes me feel like one of those guys from history writing letters back and forth on the topics du jour of their era.

I am glad that you had those positive interactions with Jørgen , and it is one of the fun parts of going to live gigs. It does also suck seeing our favourite musicians having to be their own roadies and merch guys, but it allows us to connect to them in a personal level. But at least our money is going to the right people.

You are right that these technologies enable the wolves to have more power. I posit that it's always been the case; but technology marches on, what was once a bronze spear that allowed tyrants to grab more land eventually evolved into surgical tools that allow surgeons to heal people. I feel that philosophically, human beings need to understand the new tech and tools that arise and contextualise them to be used for good and not for harm. However, there will always be people using it for harm. But those people harming us can already harm us anyay. Like I said, they were making slop in boardrooms anyway. It's not the generative AI's fault that the next wave of artificial pop is going to be made in a server.

We've had hatsune miku; a popstar that only exists as a literal product and entirely within the machine. Interestingly, there are multiple ways to view the commercial use of generative music AIs.

For example, the people making money off it now aren't the Sonys and BMGs of the world, it's random anonymous people exploiting the common people's desire for mood music. Before this, there were loads of anonymised videos/compilations on youtube with titles like "relax cafe" or "lo fi beats to study to", leaving credits of the musicians out of the video. The AI generated music fits the same niche in the same way. The music they make isn't very good, but it's not like a megacorp is exploiting this to crush the music industry further. It's just augmenting the same trend that already existed. The person getting rich off it, for now, is some dude somewhere that has had enough of life kicking them in the face and made something generic and tried to get money for it.

Would the people that look for that mood music be better served with authentic musicians for whatever mood it is they are searching for?

Yes.

Is this something new in the world of listening or music?

No.

It's the same thing as the pop music problem : the listener is an unsophisticated idiot, and wants slop. They don't care about who wrote this, what pedigree it has (family trees of bands, evolution of musical styles, compositional ideas etc), they just want "Sad, feels like raining piano". This need could be met with decent curation and attributed, or you can just buy a compilation CD of re-interpreted pop songs you already know on piano, slowed to the right tempo with a gentle woman's voice softly singing the lyrics.

Same slop. No thoughts. Handmade analog crap that's as sophisticated as mc donalds.

That's why I don't particularly see the generative AI itself as the problem. It's been generic slop and tinpan alley songs for generations already. The teenagers killed music in the 50s, it's already dead. What's another spit in the face of the dead art?

The other part is the stuff I already covered. You can experiment and find new ideas with low skills. It's something that can enrich your life and inspire you. Some things I didn't mention is empowering creatives with less skill in other areas. You can make art for a game or music for a game if you can't draw or create music. And maybe, later on, if you make connections with people, you can replace the AI placeholders with human generated ideas. But on that path, you can empower yourself to bring yourself to a stage where you can actually participate with the creators of the arts instead of being a faceless nobody.

Thank you once again for these discussions. You are in the back of my mind from time to time, I'd love to send you some guitar tracks and see if we can make some Zu/Sunn like music together, but its likely to take a long time. Stay safe, stay well, stay happy.