I want to talk about music generated with LLMs and related technology, but I don't know exactly how. The bad part is pretty bad and depressing, involving (IMO) theft-by-loophole of artist's work. (That is, even if the trained work were ALL work for hire, ideally that wouldn't grant rights to essentially incorporate that work into a dataset that would steal much of the style etc.)

I also think that in practical terms, that fight has probably been lost. It used to be the case that if you were a reasonably-skilled instrumentalist you could get work as a studio musician playing on other people's songs. I think that career path will support a lot fewer people now.

What does that mean? I don't know. I don't think it would have made a lot of sense to lament the demise of wheelwright as a profession when it was largely obviated by technical developments, but at the time I'm sure there were a lot of unhappy wheelwrights, and unhappy wheelwright families.

Personally, I think it's lamentable and depressing that technological change so often seems to come at the price of individual humans becoming further subjugated to corporate entities and their wealthy owners. That doesn't change the fact that the robot cat is out of the bag though, so I think the questions should include (a) what does it mean now that the robot cat has escaped, as well as (b) what do we do about this to make it better?