To set the stage, this comment from GM:
AI music is what really spooked me about the whole thing. I work in a very technical field and I have yet to see AI be useful for anything in it, because it just doesn’t truly know, and most importantly, UNDERSTAND anything at a level approaching a human expert. But then since early 2025 or so the AI-generated music started to be pretty hard to distinguish from the real thing, and making music is quite a complex thing.
You can still kind of hear it’s AI in the vocals, as those have a certain hiss/distortion to them, but instrumental music alone is pretty damn indistinguishable from what humans record.
Is it great? It never reaches the heights human music does, especially when it comes to the highly technical extremes.
But most human-made music doesn’t either.
And from what I’ve heard from AI, it makes truly awful music at a lower rate than humans do. It produces a lot of average-to-good, while humans mostly generate average-to-bad.
Which is not good news for humans, because most popular music is not all that complex at all (and has in fact been getting more and more simplified over time). With further improvements in AI, the average listener, who never cared all that much about music anyway, won’t either be able to tell or care much about the difference.
That will have a perverse second-order effect — humans will be discouraged from going into that line of work, because what is the point, you can’t make a living out of it. Sure, there will be live bands touring (although even there you can imagine at one point having AI bands “playing live” as holograms, no humans involved), but the market for highly skilled studio musicians and engineers will largely evaporate.
And that will have a devastating effect on the quality of music in the future, because good music comes from those people, and musical innovation comes from such highly skilled musicians improvising in the studio. Maybe one day AI will be so smart and advanced it will be able to jam on its own and come up with new ideas, but as it is structured right now, it just provides new variations of patterns it has already been trained on, not anything new.
Thus the short- to mid-term future is quite bleak. Already there was a rather bad problem with stagnation in music — not much really new in terms of fresh ideas has appeared for quite a while, which trend coincided with the transition to using computers for making music. Now with AI? Well…
Here’s the thing: AI isn’t creative. As GM says it offers variations on already existing methods or paradigms. It’s reliant on scooping up an entire volume of work on subjects, but it can’t advance to new paradigms. In other words, AI is (potentially) great for solved paradigms. It doesn’t, yet, work in all fields because it lacks judgment, but it works in some areas, at least well enough if mediocre is good enough, which, let’s be honest, it often is.
The problem is that the ladder of most careers is “learn how to do what’s already be done, then do variations on that, then start creating new stuff.” Most people never move much beyond the first two stages, and if they do they often create only one or two really new things.
As GM points out, AI is going to cut out the first step and in many cases (music being his example) the second step. That means that step three “create actually new stuff” won’t happen very much, because AI can’t do it (not this form of “AI” anyway, because it doesn’t actually understand anything it’s spewing) and there will be hardly any new practitioners, since they can’t make a living during the “learn old stuff” and “variations on old stuff” phases. Those aren’t fast phases. The 10K hours/10 years paradigm isn’t technically correct, but it does take many years to master the old stuff in a field and reach the level of mastery required to create new paradigms.
Add this to the fact that studies coming in are showing that using AI degrades the skills and reasoning ability of people who use it and you have a dismal picture: we hand over to AI our culture, and AI is unable to advance it, but reliance on AI makes it impossible for us to advance it because we no longer produce the people who can do so.
Not a pretty picture. (Also will be forestalled by civilization collapse, but means we are even more likely to be unable to avoid civilization collapse.)
More on civilization collapse and “AI” soon.
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Joe
I don’t like having a front row seat for civilization’s collapse.
That said, I don’t think technologies will have the staying power to be so ubiquitous as they are now. They will soon be too expensive to run. I don’t mean that in geologic time, either. None of these products make money, they all lose money. There is only so much patience for burning huge sums of money. Soon, that patience will be gone.
Gods help us all at that point, though, because I have a suspicion that AI speculation is what is holding up the entire US (and maybe Western) economy right now.
We’ll see how many chairs are available when the music stops.
Joan
In the self-published author circles I run in, group events and promos, as well as newsletters and ARC groups state that no part of your work can have used AI. Not for the cover art, nor for the writing of the story, etc.
As a reader, I don’t want to read something generated by a machine that scraped from authors without paying them. I want to read stories by humans. Machines do not have souls; they do not have a life to live, with which to wrangle and search for some kind of meaning.
bruce wilder
I genuinely do not understand why “we” want to automate the generation of b.s. — what is wrong with “us” that this is the primary use case? Do we need b.s. in greater quantity? Is this (b.s.) what the common man thinks of as the product of “intelligence”?
Like & Subscribe
Neither are humans. We didn’t create nature and the universe, it created us. We exist according to THAT over-arching paradigm and anything we do is according to that rule-based paradigm. We didn’t create the elements in the periodic table, we discovered them and labeled them and understood them and ultimately exploited them for our own short-term and short-sighted benefit. Same goes for the laws of physics and I would say we haven’t even scratched the surface as far as that is concerned. We rearrange the building blocks of the paradigm known as nature or the universe and call it creativity and advancement when in fact it is nothing more than what you are saying AI will possibly ever be able to accomplish — which is to say navigating clumsily and recklessly within a predominant paradigm without the potential to create new paradigms.
bruce wilder
I don’t think the table of the elements lurks in nature anymore than I imagine right-angle triangles and perfect spheres grow in my garden. Human beings have evolved an “intelligence” that is a conglomeration of partly incommensurable abilities and handicaps. Somewhere along the line of our own natural history, humans discovered that the universe is a logical place and that insight into that logic provides points of leverage to manipulate and manage physical processes to produce for us intentional outcomes.
A lot of what we celebrate as discovery and invention — mathematical notation for example or the table of the elements — are clever ways to escape our considerable handicaps, crutches if you will for the lame. Our overdeveloped cerebellum is struggling with our self-regarding frontal cortex and our amygdala soldiers on without much attention to or from either.
We have used mimicry and the division of labor extensively in rapidly broadening and deepening the collective mastery of particular processes without either most individuals attaining much insight or society as a whole developing common, shared capacity to govern our collective activity and its sum total consequences.
One “hot take” on AI is that it is an attempt by an atheistic culture to fashion a god in the human image and rescue us from our limitations.
Jan Wiklund
Seems to be a growing concern. See for example what “Stumbling and mumbling” Chris Dillow writes, https://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_and_mumbling/2025/07/stagnation-get-used-to-it.html:
“And there’s a downside to AI: it can increase the efficiency not just of productive workers but also of the enemies of genuine productivity. It will enable nimbys and their lawyers to write more letters to planning committees; it’ll allow patent trolls to become even more litigious; and in facilitating more cybercrime it’ll divert even more of our brightest people away from production towards cyber security. And even if it does raise productivity in the short-term, it could cut it in the longer-term. In writing essays for students, AI is depriving people of useful future skills. And in replacing some graduate trainees AI raises productivity today, but where will the experienced accountants and lawyers come from in 20 years’ time?”
elkern
Wall Street loves AI because it promises to eliminate millions of low-level office jobs which aren’t viewed as requiring ‘creativity’. That will be great for the Corps, but lousy for us meatbags. Not only will it mean [millions] fewer comfortable jobs with regular hours, but whenever there’s a transaction which goes sideways, your chances of finding a bureaucrat who can help you resolve it are nil.
I’m annoyed by the [ab]use of AI in music, but I don’t think that will be a long-term problem. Sure, the ‘Starmaker Machinery behind the Popular Songs’ will waste a lot of money perfecting artificial ‘music’, but ultimately that will fail because machines don’t care about getting laid. AI Pap will be even more boring than Pop music already is.
The Music Biz has already [mostly] ruined Music. As Joni Mitchell noted decades ago, the Corps prefer reliably marketable musicians over truly creative ones. AI might even do us a favor by destroying the Music Biz. Then we could all go back to playing Jug Band Music around a fire, the way it’s supposed to be…
different clue
Nobody asked “we” or “us” or “whomever” about developing and using “AI”. So questions about whether this is what “weus” mean by the product of “intelligence” are irrelevant to everything and beside every point.
I have read elsewhere that China is winning the AI race. Does that mean China is winning the race to Total Enstupidation? What happens to China if it gets there first?