Musicianship already isn’t a profitable enterprise for most, and yet kids continue to learn piano and get good enough to go to Julliard. I doubt that will change.
There’s already an endless supply of free and royalty free music in every style. While an AI can now also generate that for you as well, it was not necessary to create the AI to meet your goal and requirement.
By definition of having an AI generate something for you instead of making it yourself, you can’t create exactly what you want. You can probably get it in the ballpark, though. But that’s exactly the same scenario we have today with musicians.
The same way we traded away the profession of painters for photography, it seems like we might be trading away muscicians for generative music AI. Except photography is super useful for lots of things and truly benefitted humankind, and generative music AI… only replaces musicians? I have no idea why we would make this trade, as a society.
> The same way we traded away the profession of painters for photography
People still paint? Even portrait, although I'll acknowledge it's far less popular than it was in the 1700s. A town full of reproduction artists in China seems a bigger threat to capitalistic western artists than an AI that will mostly provide generic output.
I'd say it lets me, a non-musician, create generic tracks for other projects that need music, but don't need the Lord of the Rings soundtrack.
If you want the insane soundtrack, you still need an artist, as this project demonstrates.