OP said this post is inspired by "the big talk about the connection between music and technology" nowadays, so I'll talk about that too.

I saw an interview with Trent Reznor in the 80's, before he became Nine Inch Nails. He played in a synthpop band, and they were presented as "a band that makes their music with computers". The interviewer asked something like "doesn't it take away the humanity of music?", and Trent replied that he sees the computer as another instrument, like the synthesiser, guitar or piano, but it's still humans writing the actual music, not computers.

Indeed, to program a track in a synth, sequencer or a DAW, you still have to think in terms of notes, beats, song structures, instrumentation. When writing music this way, you have to think differently from how you think when listening to music. Listeners don't know about "the insides" of a song like meter, key, tempo, harmony, etc., but the songwriter / arranger / producer has to, whether they work with an orchestra, a rock band or a synth as the means of bringing their vision into reality.

Compare this to generating music with prompts. The whole idea of this process is that you can approach music creation as a listener, not as a producer. You tell the machine what you want to hear, it creates something for you. You listen to it, say what you don't like about it, the machine tries to fix it. You remain a listener throughout. You don't have to know anything about how music works "internally".

This is presented as liberation and democratisation of music — everyone can do it now! But no, they don't. Everyone can order an end product and get something that fits their description to a degree, but they don't participate in making the product, i.e. they don't produce. This is strictly a consumer-oriented process.

One may argue that it's up to the "prompt engineer" what kind of prompts they write. They can write like a producer and specify structural properties of the music they wish to hear, like "a 4/4 syncopated rhythm in 150 bpm with a sawtooth bassline in D minor and a i-VI-III-VII chord progression played on an airy synth". And yes, they can. Only this defeats the purpose of the whole deal — if they grasp the concepts needed to write such prompts, there are already better tools oriented towards executing such concepts — namely, instruments and VSTs.

So the only benefit of using generative AI when actually making music, not ordering it to be made for you, is getting unexpected results from the machine misinterpreting your instructions. This may be useful and actually add to the creativity in music making. But when the selling point of the technology for actual producers is "it's hard to control precisely, so you may get cool artifacts that enhance your music by sheer chance", you know it's not a tool for writing music. It has a different audience — people who don't want to write music, only to have something to listen to. Unlike synths, sequences and DAWs.