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much music is already drivel, what’s the harm of adding even more drivel to the pile. i am a smart person.

I mean, the problem is that drivel is what gets rewarded, doesn’t matter how it gets made. More people are able to express themselves through music than were able to before, that’s unambiguously good. That music is a commodity to be bought and sold as property is bad, same as before

Generating wav files with AI is not making music in any sense that is perceptible to anyone who has ever made music. It’s a different thing entirely, and it sucks

I am an instrumentalist and have also long embraced electronic and digital means as well. My musical horizon is broad: I can enjoy procedural techniques as well as a live jam session. The key is to be “in” the music, and when you’re in the music, no tiny detail is insignificant. Every moment counts.

If someone can express themselves by externalizing something that they couldn’t before, that’s a capability worth reproducing at some, socially-determined, cost. The fact that capital incentivizes using any capability to produce wasteful garbage is nothing new, and worth any cost to struggle against

All else being equal, your creative process is no more or less valid than someone who lacks conditions that yours requires, or who requires conditions yours doesn’t. Should we launch nukes to enable people with a passing fancy to prompt an LLM to

make a version of a commercial jingle with fart sounds instead of piano? We’d agree not. But should we say that only the people able to make music under the specific conditions that existed at very narrow places and times are real or valid? I’d argue no.

We have to distinguish between something created as expression, and something created as commodity. Which, to me, means accepting that so long as the commodity form persists, there is no objective distinction, only subjective ones. Tl;dr your problem with genAI is your problem with capitalism, not