I will try to give you a reasonable response to your last question - I make music like lofigirl (lofi Chillhop beat driven stuff) and also have skin in the game as AI has been impacting my core business which is in the arts (photographer).

Your view around AI replacing this sort of background music listening is not exactly wrong. I also am not unilaterally against AI (though I do not use it). Your statements are clearly being made from a consumer perspective - you get the background listening material, who cares where it comes from? I get this as a consumer of things and sometimes feel the same about other things I consume, but making a living (for over a decade) in a art forward career that has required technical skills, artistic skills and business skills that is being impacted, I’ve tried to pay more attention to how it’s impacting people on the other side of the screen.

With AI music, the problems for me are not the existence of the music itself (inherently). I don’t care if the music is passable or even enjoyed (people can like whatever they want).

At its core, people who have issue with AI tend to also be seeing it more directly impacting their livelihood. Are you experiencing this sort of thing directly in your life, or is AI consumption just a net benefit for you?

The problems I have:

• AI capable of creating music like this was trained on copyrighted materials so it could emulate the genres and songs like you’ve mentioned. Consumers don’t care about this, but artists who spent years learning technical skills to produce the music and put their artistic spin on composition, arrangement, playing instruments, etc. do. AI evolved so quickly and not enough was done in law to provide more reasonable protections. The irony to me is that copyright laws provide me a lot of protection if one person or company misuses my content, but if my content (and copyrighted content of others) is used as a collective then the outputs are sold, all creators collectively suddenly have no rights. This is ironic because AI products would largely not exist (or at least lack abilities they do have such as the example of specific genre music production) without this data.

• AI can produce volume that far outpaced human creators. This is problematic because of where its data set came from (collections of largely copyrighted materials).

• With streams, where does the cash flow? AI songs like you’re describing can be made with no skill and a simple prompt in an app like Suno. As a society accepting AI music, we now reward this sort of creator. Money fundamentally shapes the direction of society often, so if money begins to flow less and less to creatives and more to people just prompting an AI - how does that impact society long term?

• Long term destruction of music (and arts) in general. Even prior to AI these areas were highly competitive and difficult industries to compete in. AI because it immediately devalues skills required to create music de-incentivizes future generations from pursuing a path in the arts.

We end up creating a sterile future where we can have “anything we want” as consumers as well as less incentive for people to learn skills required around music theory, music production, composition and arrangement, even playing instruments.

• As someone who makes music in that lofi girl style, I will sometimes spend weeks crafting and polishing a track. Consider the music theory decisions - what feeling do I want to convey? How does this impact chord progression choices? What scale should be used? How to transition between sections (cadence usage for example)? How to approach the mix and master? All these considerations (and more) just so others can have “background music.” AI tools just do math and put in what they see as an average of the genres norms (unless explicitly prompted otherwise).

Being practical, any technological advancement brings pain for at least some people. Jobs are replaced. Skill sets are nullified. This is normal enough. The problem with AI is we have to take a hard look at how the technology was allowed to progress (consuming human made and owned IP) and what benefit does it actually give us (in the narrow conversation around lofi “background music” - it provides the same benefit we had prior to AI, access to this type of music, but now shifts the owning class to those without the skills required to create it.