[jzb]

Creating art is an enjoyable human activity. I totally agree. But "creating" is subjective. At pretty much every technological step for music in my memory and somewhat before, people have lobbed something like your objection against it.

- Recorded music is bad because it kills live performance. - Effects are bad because it takes away from natural sound of music. Processing vocals is bad because it lets less skilled vocalists supplant better singers. - Studio techniques like splicing multiple performances together to get one good one are bad. If a guitarist can't play a solo in one go, it's clearly bad. (IIRC Def Leppard, for example, got a lot of side-eye about the album Hysteria for this.) - Synthesizers are bad because they're artificial and/or replace actual musicians. (Had a class with a guy who was unbearable about synths because he played horn and if a band could just program a horns track / play horns with synths, he was out of a job.) - Sampling is bad because it just copy/pastes previous ideas and that's not really creating art... (Raging debate in the 80s about whether sampling was real music, etc.)

I see music as "more than a mere arrangement of sounds." I have spent quite a bit of money over the years to see live music, buy albums by artists I value, and there's still songs that send shivers up my spine every time I play them.

But I don't think an AI that could deliver on creating mashups or generative music is going to make living more miserable. Monetizing everything is what makes living more miserable. Maybe they're intertwined to a large extent. But if I had an AI that could create music that actually matches my descriptions, I don't think that would make life miserable or take away from actual muscians.

e.g. - I'd love to be able to get an AI to create something like a John Lennon song written with Khruangbin, or "what if Miles Davis played with John Entwistle from The Who?" That doesn't take away from any existing music or future music.