To each their own (I mean that) but I do wonder sometimes…At some point, what’s the point?
Here's my guess: I think that this stuff will continue to iterate until it's to the point where the amount of control people have over it as well as the quality of handling edge cases is sufficient to allow people with fairly unsophisticated tools to create things that look fairly high quality. And once this happens, people armed with amazing tools but no better taste than they had before, will flood the Internet with a bunch of tasteless garbage at rates never before seen. It hasn't happened yet, but I think this is partly an accessibility issue (not everyone has datacenter GPU access, there's still limitations in open models, and many hosted offerings are pretty limited compared to what local models can do right now in terms of tooling) but also it will make a big difference if we hit the point where it's really genuinely just not possible to reliably distinguish AI generated images and sound. Then, even if people wanted to ignore AI generated media, it would probably quickly become pretty difficult, and many people will probably not be honest if it limits their reach and potential.
You could call it "taste", though it doesn't exactly matter what you call it. You know it when you see it. Every so often, someone sells me on why something is awesome and suddenly it 'clicks' for me in a way that it hasn't, and now I'm enjoying something on another level. Thanks to curation and filtering by picky people, you get to experience a lot of things that would be hard to discern on your own. In general, you still have to rely on your own untrained senses to judge things, so curation can be very helpful to find the best stuff. Sometimes you don't know why something is better, but that doesn't mean you can't tell.
So then, a problem with generative AI is that it will mainly be optimized to mimic the appealing end results and then probably also tuned to prefer things that people respond positively to. That's cool and it can definitely produce results that people like, but I think it misses a lot of dimensions of artistic endeavors. Stable Diffusion today isn't drawing; it's forming pictures out of noise that look like they were drawn. No reason, imo, to believe an AI model won't some day actually be drawing; it's just not what's going on today. But because Stable Diffusion skips all of the details, it does things that don't make stylistic sense at all, like putting vastly overly photo-realistic details/rendering onto a cartoon drawing and other such bizarre things. On one hand, this is probably something that can be fixed, but I also think that fixing it is patching around the fact that it's generating images rather than creating them the way a person would. (To me, diffusion models feel like they could be the "imagination" of some AI agent that draws; but, ultimately, I have no idea what the future will hold.) The other thing that's awkward about the way this works is that it's a bit deceptive: looking at the end results, you can see things that are extremely impressive at times, but no doubt part of the problem is that it's difficult for us to actually evaluate it. For any of these very impressive generative models, I think that a surprising ability of being able to produce novel things has been demonstrated in many cases, but the truth is that even some less novel things tend to still be hard. Kind of like how you can generate a pig with a cowboy hat in space using one of these generative models, but ask it to generate two people holding hands and you may be treated with man-made horrors beyond our comprehension. (Or maybe it will work, but either way, the failure mode of these models is very interesting.)
OK, so I droned on a bit there. But what I'm trying to say is, I think these generative AIs are basically all going to be tuned to be as appealing as possible to the average person. Because of that, they will short-circuit our dumb ape brains into thinking "Wow! This is surprisingly good!" even though they are often lacking much substance and a closer inspection may show plenty of issues and general strangeness.
I think that more advanced AI agents might some day overcome this on a fundamental level, by simply not skipping "the hard part" and going right to the end result. That would help limit a lot of weirdness that just fundamentally does not make sense. Even when that happens, though, I suspect the domain of AI stuff will wind up being more limited than it initially appears, as the generative models will prove to have unintuitive limitations, and as a result of that, we may see floods of very same-y garbage stuff.
I'd be glad to be very wrong here. In the past, the availability of powerful tools definitely did what you said: it raises the bar. I mean, seeing what kids are doing in Blender and Inkscape feels like proof of this. AI does change some variables in a way that is scary, though: it produces things effectively infinitely fast and infinitely voluminous compared to humans, and at least by my measure it often achieves superficially good results, and the flaws may not be apparent quickly and maybe not at all to the untrained senses.
So maybe we're in for a flood of same-y garbage. Or maybe not. Guess we'll see.
What’s it matter, if the mind can’t tell either from aether. Samsara, no Abraham’s Sara, abra-cadabra, open sesame, oh well, stuck in the loop, but who cares, we’re in this together so I’ll take either. Some say Samuel paved the way, eat the apple, it’ll be fine they say.
The widespread availability of DAWs, streaming services, and music distribution services has greatly enabled people to create and publish their music online. Not to mention services like Splice which enable the purchase and curation of ready-made musical loops. It's never been easier to make a record, render it, and distribute it.
Of course the problem then becomes one of sifting through the endless pool of releases. There's a lower ratio of quality signal to noise. So be it. I still get the majority of my recommendations from people who I trust to have good taste.
I happen to think this enabling of creation is a net positive because it breaks down barriers for people to be creative and I consider that to be an intrinsically rewarding activity. At the end of the day creators still need to have good taste and discipline to see their vision realized or succeed, but the act of creating itself is beneficial to people on a personal level. Even if their creation is objectively hot trash.
Hard to predict, but I'm sure we'll get something new out of it. Imagine a talented singer just freewheeling with an AI band backing the vocals. A few prompt nudges before you start ("something in the style of Aphex Twin with bagpipes"), some buttons to make live adjustments, with labels like "darker / brighter", "more pop / more alternative" or "activate cowbell".
I guess the main thing to solve is reproducible output, but we almost have the technology to do this.
You don't have to be a singer either. Practicing an instrument could be so much more fun when a complete song in the style of your favorite band is generated along with whatever you are doing.
Electronic music production is not easy. If you really just throw some samples in a daw, it will sound like a 10 year old made it and it will probably break people's speakers because it's not mixed and mastered properly. Electronic music is a mature enough genre (that incidentally even in its inception was originated by people who were also traditional musicians) that fans don't accept a macaroni collage of a song that once again probably would break their speakers.
The barrier to entry was significantly lowered through electronics. I was making music on Fruity loops when I was 12 years old. It was shit, but I had everything I needed in a single program. Becoming a producer however is extremely difficult.
The same will happen with AI. The barrier of entry to making something nice will be even lower. But mastering the AI tools, and really using it and combining it with musical knowledge will be extremely hard.
And those people will rise to the top of creating new musical genres, with the inclusion of AI.