A world with no human musicians won’t happen, unless there is some extinction-level event that at a minimum leads to a new dark age. AI music will not outcompete human music (at least not to the point where the latter is not practised professionally any more), because a large part of the appeal of music is the knowledge that another human made it.
We have a similar situation today in chess. Of course a cellphone can generate chess games that are of higher quality (less errors, awesome positional and tactical play) than those of human world-class players. If one generates a sufficient number of such self-play games, some will even be beautiful and contain interesting new chess ideas. Still, nobody is interested in self-play games from my cellphone, precisely because anyone can make more of the same at almost no cost. The games of Magnus Carlsen, on the other hand, are followed and analysed and scrutinised by many, precisely because there is a struggle of human wits in each of these games and they are not abundantly available; they are masterpieces of human chess, and better (not worse) for the flaws we can easily discover in them with engine help.
A world with no human musicians won’t happen, unless there is some extinction-level event that at a minimum leads to a new dark age. AI music will not outcompete human music (at least not to the point where the latter is not practised professionally any more), because a large part of the appeal of music is the knowledge that another human made it.
We have a similar situation today in chess. Of course a cellphone can generate chess games that are of higher quality (less errors, awesome positional and tactical play) than those of human world-class players. If one generates a sufficient number of such self-play games, some will even be beautiful and contain interesting new chess ideas. Still, nobody is interested in self-play games from my cellphone, precisely because anyone can make more of the same at almost no cost. The games of Magnus Carlsen, on the other hand, are followed and analysed and scrutinised by many, precisely because there is a struggle of human wits in each of these games and they are not abundantly available; they are masterpieces of human chess, and better (not worse) for the flaws we can easily discover in them with engine help.