I think there's a lot of different reasons all simultaneously going on.

Most human musicians have very little power; that's been going away for a long time, even since "canned music" "robots" pushed live bands out of cinemas a century ago: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/musicians-wage-war-ag...

Most popular music already feels, and to an extent is, fake. Not only because mere recording allows repeated takes until it's inhumanly "perfect".

When I played an MP3 of Britney Spears to my mum around the turn of the century, she thought it was a robot singing because of the autotune.

The Monkees was famously an attempt at a manufactured band whose members just happened to not feel like playing that game and did it for real, Gorillaz is even more obviously manufactured. Parasocial relationships are inherently different from "real" relationships, but the performers have to pretend that it's personal when they address a crowd or a camera.

Axis of Awesome demonstrated the similarity of most modern hits with their "4 Chords": https://youtu.be/oOlDewpCfZQ?feature=shared

Those with the power were, possibly still are, the record labels; but if the AI are trained on the works of small musicians that can't afford the copyright cases or the political influence, but also whose works are not under the umbrella of the labels who do have those resources but not the right or short term motivation to intercede on their behalf, the big labels themselves may lose the consumer market to free AI output, while professionals will dismiss both the AI output and the label's output as "just different kinds of slop but both slop" (or whatever the current insult de jour is for AI).

Agreed. To me AI generated images look horrible, and AI generated audio is still somewhat gut twisting but less painful. AI generated code works for HTML/CSS+JS, but not that great for others. AI generated e-commerce reviews ... on par with human reviews?

I'm starting to think that what AI might be replacing is high ends of consumption, not low ends of generation. Arts has followers that are often less historically significant than genre pioneering works. Doesn't that seem like what AI is doing?

People were happy with the included wired iPhone earbuds for years, even though they were terrible.

Listening on a laptop speaker Sumo sounds fine. Listening on my wireless earbuds it is... ok. I am too lazy anymore to pull out any of my high quality wired headphones, and if somebody who used to care about sound quality enough to purchase multiple HQ headphones can't be arsed, then the general pubic really is going to think everything is just fine.

I find almost all popular music that's made in the past 20+ years quite terrible. This is not worse. For people who enjoy this chewing gum stuff, which seems most of the population of earth, this is fine. And as such, this will be all popular music in the future; upload your voice, pick a style, generate 13 songs, go on tour to make money.

Lots of artists can reproduce existing content, should we get rid of them entirely, or just restrict them from publishing such content? If anything, it's the responsibility of the publisher to avoid copyright infringement.

> Also, personally I have no interest in a service that generates a song for you because it takes away all the fun. Maybe something that helps to find mistakes in composed music and help learning would be much more useful.

You are not forced to use the full raw output, you could use it sparingly in your new composition, the same way you might use ChatGPT to improve your lyrics.

All non-musician friends where thrilled to generate music. It's already extremely fun and will keep getting better. I think it lowers the barrier of entry and will increase the total amount of performers, the "real" musicians. I am sure musicians playing instruments back in the days had the same idea about digital music: "Not playing with the physical instruments takes away all the fun. You can't touch, smell, feel it. It has a negative impact on the music and on the people. I am so smart, I am a democrat, you guys are nazis, you want to destroy humanity while I want to restrict the majority of the people from having fun.".

> lot of effort and money to produce Mathematical formulas too, and you can't copyright them.

If a new device is invented to replay memory "almost verbatim (but in lower quality) for example". Should its use be restricted with regard to copyrighted content? It's your memory, your unique interpretation, shouldn't it belong to you?

AI will get better and you'll be able to easily go up the tree from which content was derived (intentionally or not) based on the similarity and the publication date.

Artists don't need more protections than mathematicians.

> Do you see any learning or any creativity here?

Of course not if we take it to the extreme, ie only copyrighted work reproduced almost identical, but I've used the platform with my own music and it reorganized it in a very interesting way, actually inspiring new songs and arrangements which I'll probably play with real instruments. I haven't the slightest interest in replicating top chart garbage; however lawsuits by major labels are ruining also the creative aspect where no copyrighted work is involved. Suno is now quite likely retraining their model only on free music because of the lawsuits, and despite the hype, for some genres last version turned out awful.