It isn't so black and white.
People keep forming these analogies/explanations with the inherent premise that what we have now is what AI is going to be - "It's actually kind of shitty so don't fret, not much will change".
AI music creation has improved more in the last 5 years than keyboard accompaniment improved in the previous 40 years. It would be very brazen to bet that the tech 5 years from now is hardly any better. Especially when scaling transformers has consistently improved outputs. Double especially when the entire tech industry is throwing the house at scaling it.
The reason why people like music is because another person wrote and performed it. We like watching other people.
Give us an infinite playlist of elevator music and it just becomes oatmeal.
Popular music has already been synthetic and souless for decades now. People will listen to what sounds good to them, and we already know the bar is very low, and that the hard truth is that it is all subjective anyway.
https://www.nydailynews.com/2016/05/29/thousands-of-new-york...
You just proved my point for me.
https://legacy.iftf.org/future-now/article-detail/making-mik...
We’ve had software accompaniment for a long time. Elevator music. The same 4 chords arranged in similar ways for decades. Hasn’t destroyed music. Neither will AI.
At some point people are going to want to know who’s on the other side making the music.
Unless your argument is that nobody values artists… which is I guess one of the primary conceits of GenAI enthusiasts today.
Think back to the mid-1980s and the first time everyone got their hands on a Casio or Yamaha keyboard with auto-accompaniment.
It was a huge amount of fun to play with, just pressing a few buttons, playing a few notes and feeling like you were producing a "real" pop song. Meanwhile, any actual musicians were to be found crying in the corner of the room, not because a new tool had come along which threatened their position, but because non-musicians apparently didn't understand (at least immediately) the difference between these superficial, low-effort machine-generated sounds and actual music.