Whether this stops at the uncanny valley or progresses to specific "AI celebrity" voices, I'm left thinking the engineers involved in this never stopped to think carefully about whether this ought to be done in the first place.
I think their main target is corporate creative jobs. Background music to ads/videos/etc. And just like with all AI, they will eat the jobs that support the rest of the system, making it a one and done. It will give a one time boost, and then be stuck at that level because creatives won't have the jobs that allowed them to add to the domain. In this case new music styles. New techniques. It's literally eating the seed corn where the sprouts are the creatives working in the boring commercial jobs that allow them to practice/become experts in the tools/etc that they then build up it all. Their goal is cut the jobs that create their training data and the ecosystem that builds up/expands the domain. Everywhere AI touches will basically be 'stuck using Cobol' because AI will be frozen at the point in time where the energy infusing 'sprouts' all had their jobs replaced by AI and without them creating new output for AI to train on it's all ossified.
We are witnessing in real time the answer to why 'The Matrix' was set when it was. Once AI takes over there is no future culture.
Assuming you are right and that we will miss a generation of creatives and AI keeps making crap, why can't the creative field regrow. AI won't remove creativity from human genes.
As people get fed up with AI generated crap, companies will start to pay very good money to the few remaining good human creatives in order to differentiate themselves. The field will then be seen as desirable, people will start working hard for to get these jobs, companies will take apprentices hoping they will become masters later, etc... We may lose a generation, but certainly not the entire future.
Of course, it is just one of many possible futures, but I think the most likely if you take your assumptions as a postulate. It may turn out that AIs end up not displacing creative jobs too much, or going the other way, that AIs end up being truly creative, building their own culture together with humans, or not.
Step 0. Some People make novel art like a jingle that is unlike anything yet.
Step 1. Early use of said jingle creates a buzz and generated good sales results.
Step 2. It gets copied everywhere and by everyone. It is now a meme.
This is the step I think where generative AI can help. Slightly transform existing art to fit a particular purpose. This lets businesses save money by not paying humans do this work.
Problem is we don't know where the next person or when this step 0 comes from... When we soak up all the "slack" and send all the "money" to the top because lets face it that's how it will work. The money "saved" from AI won't make goods and services cheaper by any significant measure. We will still have to pay as much as we can afford to pay.
> It's literally eating the seed corn where the sprouts are the creatives working in the boring commercial jobs that allow them to practice/become experts in the tools/etc that they then build up it all.
This is a big problem that needs to be talked about more, the endgoal of AI seems to be quite grim for jobs and generally for humans. Where will this pure profit lead to? If all advertising will be generated who will want to have anything to do with all the products they’re advertising?
Reminds me of that famous clip from mad men where don suddenly realizes that if lucky strike can't say its cigarettes are safe, neither can its competitors and came up with "it's toasted".
In general, I have a feeling double digit growth forever is impossible. Facebook and Google both reported YoY growth in 15%+ this week iirc and I have a feeling they are only able to achieve this by destroying either competitors or adjacent industries rather than by "making the pie bigger". It will end at some point.
Almost everyone has a job to sustain their actual interests. Some of them happen to be musicians, writers, etc. Others play football, go fishing, talk to friends. There is nothing special in there. All of us will keep doing what we like to do even after AIs become the tool of mainstream creativity.
It's the holy grail. When people can have naturalistic conversations with their computers they will love it more than other people. Ai doesn't need to be useful so much as it needs to be loved. That's the secret to getting AI between people and everything they do in a day.
