> Synthesizers are instruments. They allow for the same level of subtle input as strings or woodwinds.

Synthesizer instruments, yes. Sequencers, trackers, and modern DAWs like Ableton, absolutely not. They’re entirely different animals and are very much a musical analogue to “prompt engineering.” They have also enabled some incredible art that would be impossible if musicians were limited only to what they could play into a recorded (or midi) tape.

I suspect that the same will prove to be true of generative AI, and that those artists that embrace it will see a golden age of creativity. But there will also be many artists who see their craft diminished in value, much like what has happened to studio drummers. And I could be completely wrong, but either way the genie is out of the bottle, so we’re going to find out.

And specifically the earliest sequencers were step sequencers that were as simplistic as current prompts are (a 16x16 grid with each of the 256 notes set off or on and that's it). But as people explored the medium the tooling changed, which I also expect will happen with generative AI.

But what is art at its core? It's an individual expressing their thoughts, experiences, emotions, a direct connection to their brain. The importance is not the fidelity of yet another painted tree that looks like trees painted before it.

These kinds of tools are democratizing visual expression; with that, we should place even more importance on what is being told and expressed. In some ways I see it as a new form of writing. We're in our duchamp readymade era.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Readymades_of_Marcel_Duchamp