Any honest person at this point has to admit that AI-generated music cannot be dismissed out of hand as "slop". It is, at least much of it, unequivocally good, and is indistinguishable from music made by skilled and artists and producers. The ramifications of this fact are currently unknown, but they will likely be profound and far-reaching, given how impactful music is on human culture.
I think a best-case scenario is that people gradually come to regard the use of AI in music as being little different from the powerful music production software that producers have already been using for decades. After all, if a song is already using a bunch of sampled instruments and sound packs cobbled together by software, is there much more of a difference having AI generate voices and melodies of its own? I think that convenience, economics, and sheer popularity will win out over any lingering attachment to human-exclusive performance and creativity, and AI music will soon be treated the same as traditionally produced and recorded music. In the end, all that really matters is how catchy the song is, and how much people enjoy listening to it.
We've already seen AI take over in the production of visual art. Music will be next, and then the major shift will be movies and television shows produced entirely with the use of AI. That's when things will really start to get weird and unpredictable. We've already suffered the death of American monoculture, which in a racially, politically, and religiously divided country, was, along with a good economy, the only thing holding people together. But with the rise of AI-generated audiovisual media, people will move from existing inside of cultural silos like they do now, to existing exclusively in their own individual, atomized cultural experience, one tailored to their exclusive tastes by their own individual algorithm.
People who fall into this abyss will, after some time, eventually discover that they no longer have anything in common with anyone at all, and have essentially surrendered a large portion of their humanity. Things could get very dark and confusing until society acclimates to this dangerous new technology.
