It's not like these discussions haven't have quite a lot of precedence. I bought a 4-track tape "portastudio" back in the 90s, but it didn't make me a good pro

It's not like these discussions haven't have quite a lot of precedence. I bought a 4-track tape "portastudio" back in the 90s, but it didn't make me a good producer- years of playing music with dozens of groups did that. And I bought a canon xl1, but that didn't make the movies I was making more compelling than if I'd had budget to shoot on 16mm. Creativity and good craft come from struggling to communicate an idea; anything that short circuits that will make you a worse artists. AI is, to me, like claming that because you have access to a forklift going to the gym is no longer useful- you're missing both the aesthetic and material reasons why folks have been doing things. What's worse- people claim a forklift is better than, say, working out and then say to the folks who were working out "this is what you're doing and it is dumb to spend all that effort doing it". That's nothing new either- I get why folks look at a lot of my early, cracked FruityLoop-based work from 2002 with some disdain-- it misses all of the nuances and trade-craft knowledge that I gained playing in bands over the following 20 years. And I know how it sounds because I can hear it in the products of other young musicians: I play a lot of jazz with kids in their 20s who have way better chops than I ever will and who have a lot of the real book memorized. That real book allows them to pick up the tunes super fast, but they don't have a lot of the nuance that the 70 year olds I sometimes get to play with have in their playing. I use AI for the dumbest stuff, like writing contracts for mechanical licensing. It's shit, because I'm just looking to copy some already-written document without paying a lawyer. I can't see see why folks would -want- to use it to make documents that no one else had previously thought would be worth writing and to me it very much seems like it can only produce, by definition, derivative works. Musicians are terrible about that. I love being in a cover band, because I usually like the people and playing. But absent that, simply being able to "poof here's 'your' cover of Stariway" seems super boring, almost soul crushing. And paying AI do the creative parts- that's like paying someone to have sex with my partner because I wanted to spend my nights playing video games instead of woodshedding on pedal steel guitar :D All that is to say- I agree.