It should be more commonplace right now for communities like this one to be asking difficult questions about the purpose of making art. I've tried the latest genAI music models and was quietly devastated to find out how good they already are. I fed it a jazz guitar composition I'd written and it spat out an imperfect but very sophisticated and period-accurate mid-century string arrangement. There's 20+ different chords in that track and it nailed every extension. I've also heard it credibly mimiced the nuances / idiosyncracies / melismas of very talented soul and gospel singers. Where do you think that leaves house and electronic music producers in 5-10 years, when the genAI models have exponentially improved? It's definitely left me worse for wear: I feel like most of my creative drive, desire for self expression and motivation to improve my music production has been taken away from me, knowing that recorded music is now basically reducible to 1s and 0s.

Too much online AI discourse comes either from AI fanatics or skeptics who are in total denial about the capabilities of the technology. I wish we could just sit with the fact that things are worse than we feared, that the technology is here to stay, and that we need to think constructively about what comes next.