[bccdee]

> AI will become good enough to write songs better than humans; it's a matter of time.

I'm unconvinced. The process of songwriting is so dependent on being able to listen to what you've made and decide whether you enjoy it or not. We can train a model to imitate popular music, but we can't train a model to enjoy music, because we can't quantify enjoyment and turn it into a data set. You can train an LLM on soup recipes, but you can't train one to taste the soup and tell you whether it's good or not.

That's part of what offends me so much about the notion of AI-assisted "creativity." Creating music should be a way of engaging more deeply with music, but you've discovered a way to pay even less attention to music than before. None of the details in an AI-generated song really matter; they were chosen arbitrarily, because they seemed normal. Indeed, they are so normal that your ear will slide right off of them.

You can't fix a soup that someone else prepared—not as an amateur. You don't know what went into it, so you can't pick out the individual flavours and decide whether they're right or not. They were never "right" for you, because you didn't pick them. It's like ordering a Big Mac, taking it apart, and trying to workshop it into Duck à l'Orange. All you get is a Big Mac with some orange slices on it. Maybe you like Big Macs; maybe you're happy. It's a pretty poor substitute for creativity, though.