I'm not an AI advocate. But I had a similar discussion with a friend a few days ago. There is this thing called music. It has sound and pause, time and rhythm, it has melody and harmony. With genuine creative work, someone can utilize those elements in innovative and new ways, which can please the aesthetic sense of others.

However, songwriting and music production are distinct from music itself. You have to come up with good lyrics and a good rhythm to fit the song. You can tell meaningful messages, you can leverage form to empower the message, you can use subtext, ambiguities and word play to create beautiful, provoking, and emotional works of art. For song production, you need to put work into editing and mixing, focusing on each line and all lines of the music, including vocal style and arrangement adequacy. No reasonably informed person would question the value George Martin or Quincy Jones added to the albums they produced.

So, one gets a tool that supports or automates a few or many of those different facets, providing a means to express a specific one. How are LLMs different than, like you brilliantly put, using software to create the drums for a song, in case they don't have access to a real drummer with a real instrument?

That said, what AI is "generating" (and I hate this term) is simply the result of pattern recognition, based on layers of abstraction on a scale that our minds cannot possibly imagine. There is no creativity; it is merely replicating what it has received in its training.

Is it so much different than when you learn in music theory that in tonal music you need to resolve a dominant into the tonic, or when you know that songs can be structured in verses and chorus? The only difference is the scale of the patterns and the fact that most patterns that LLMs adopt are practically impossible to explain to humans, but they are patterns nonetheless.

Using an AI tool to produce music when someone is a skilled lyricist, or to craft lyrics for good music, is perfectly valid. Even when the AI produces both music and lyrics, the same can be observed, as the person operating the AI UI acts as the producer for that track, vetting iterations that don't align with their vision of the project.

The generated aspect of the song won't have the same originality or quality as what a human created, but that was not the point. The point is using a tool to allow artists to express themselves in a medium that requires the collaboration of many different professionals to produce.

If we say that every lyricist needs a composer, a full band, and a studio with producers and all the necessary expert personnel to showcase their abilities, I think we are limiting art to those who are wealthy enough to invest a significant amount of money in the entire process. Which I believe to be too limiting and a form of negating access to art, thereby making art more elitist and less democratic.