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Comment by romaniv | Hacker News Reader

We can't automate filling out Excel spreadsheets, but investing 4 million dollars in automating music creation. Meanwhile there are plenty of CC-licensed tracks and plenty of aspiring composers/producers who would gladly work on creating tracks for "commercials or short online videos" for very reasonable price.

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I think the question is of quality. Many people can make music, and anyone can automate making noise, but automating making music, good music, is something that's hard to do, and has a huge market.

One can hope that one day we'll be autogenerating music based on individual preferences in a way that every piece you hear is a unique arrangement.

I wouldn't want that any more than I'd never want to eat a favorite dish again. Novelty can be nice but it's not the only thing that makes an experience good.

We can automate filling out of Excel spreadsheets. See flash fill : https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Use-AutoFill-and-Fl...

Those are pretty handy features, but they are not nearly enough. I know plenty of people who spend several hours a day entering, validating and fixing data in giant Excel spreadsheets because they need to work with multiple systems that don't have real integration points. That work is mind-numbingly boring and completely avoidable. (Besides, system integration is also rote work, only one level up. I know plenty of engineers whose only job is to constantly write adapters between various web services.)

need for filling out excel sheets automatically is not greater or lesser than music automation. One field doesn't have to wait for the other to be solved imo.

Also, there are plenty of able workers ready to fill Excel sheet for a very reasonable price but that is not the point here either.

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