[brookst]

The is the age-old music parochial thing. "Oh, he's just in a cover band, he doesn't write anything" / "Oh, she's just a composer, she can't even play the stuff she writes" / "Oh, he writes and plays his own stuff but knows fuck all about theory so it's not real music" / etc.

Me, I'm having a blast with claude code, MCP, and Ableton. I'm directing harmony and asking for arrangements and variations in rhythm, mixing, and production. Don't know if that counts as "making it myself", but then I was writing music before I could actually play any instrument at all, so :shrug:

[tunesmith]

I think there's a way to define it without it either side feeling personally attacked. One of the things I like about using agents for programming is that if the spec is detailed enough, I can implement it in a number of different languages and still get the thing I intended. That means that the "art" is in the spec, not the implementation.

I think the question with AI in music is when it gets to that point. What's the musical spec? What's the implementation? If the spec is supposed to be the pure distillation of my intent, then shouldn't that mean each time I engage AI to "implement" the spec, the musical output of the AI should be the same?

At that point I'm all in favor of using AI for music. But when AI is used to replace a specific intent with vague intent, that's where I feel like something is lost in the human experience of human-created music.