The people that use generative Al for art have no interest in being an artist; they simply want product to consume and forget about when the next piece of product goes by their eyes. The people that use generative Al to make music have no interest in being a musician; they simply want a machine to make them something to listen to until they get bored and want the machine to make some other disposable slop for them to pass the time with.

My critique on this that the people who produce this stuff don’t have interest in it for its own sake. They only have interest in it to crowd out the people who actually do, and to produce a worse version of it in a much faster time than it would for someone with actual talent to do so. But the reason they produce it is for profit. Gunk up the search results with no-effort crap to get ad revenue. It is no different than “SEO.”

Example: if you go onto YouTube right now and try to find any modern 30-60m long video that’s like “chill beats” or “1994 cyberpunk wave” or whatever other bullshit they pump out (once you start finding it you’ll find no shortage of it), you’ll notice that all of those uploaders only began as of about a year ago at most and produce a lot of videos (which youtube will happily prioritize to serve you) of identical sounding “music.” The people producing this don’t care about anything except making money. They’re happy to take stolen or plagiarized work that originated with humans, throw it into the AI slot machine, and produce something which somehow is no longer considered stolen or plagiarized. And the really egregious ones will link you to their Patreons.

The story is the same with art, music, books, code, and anything else that actually requires creativity, intuition, and understanding.