To be fair, most commercialized music is formulaic, the only difference is that people had to be paid to record it.
I think the biggest problem with AI generated stuff is that the I in AI is hype, these things can't create real novelty. They're a new, poorly understood form of compression. If creativity is left to these AIs then the music will sound the same in 20 years at best, or more likely, degrade/converge when they're all trained on each other's and their own material.
Lots of art techniques-- e.g. a basic set of shapes to help draw heads with correct proportions-- are formulaic. That doesn't make them any less artistic than someone just throwing down marks based on their gut instinct. Music itself has been boiled down to a mathematical and artistic scaffolding that people have worked within for centuries. There are also a whole hell of a lot of creative decisions in between the sheet music and the finished product: instrumentation and all of the subtleties that go into it, recording itself is SO deep and heavily affects the outcome, everything that goes into post production to add all of the color and texture that makes it great... even within recording it, do you know how many hours people spend pouring over really great studio takes because they all land a little differently? This just takes what other people have already done and mushes it together. Is it interesting? Interesting as hell. Could it be useful to people making art? I'm a commercial artist in a different realm and generative AI has been very useful in generating specific references or doing some sort of concept test instead of sketching it out. It could be used as a tool to help make art, but is it making art? Not by any definition I think makes sense. The idea that this is just an incremental step in current commercial music production is only possible if you don't actually know what it takes to make it. The very same thing is true of video games, TV& movies, graphic design, etc. etc. etc.
It would be a net positive if it didn't facilitate a whole bunch of Dunning-Kruger 'artists' summiting Mt. Stupid flooding the lower end of the commercial art markets with vaguely convincing looking bullshit. It weakens our artistic culture, waters down professional standards at the lower end of the markets putting a whole bunch of workaday or entry-level people out of jobs, and in turn, pushes less qualified people upmarket which makes it harder to hire and find work, and weakens salaries. Also, since the MBAs in charge will inevitably shove these tools down people's throats, it takes the most enjoyable parts of the artistic process away from you, replaces it with a bunch of crap amalgamated from a billion other people's work, and leaves the fussy, irritating, soulless, and completely not-rewarding task of cleaning up and enhancing some algorithm's bullshit. It would be like if developers had to start every single coding task with an ever-changing template of completely clusterfuck spaghetti code made by the worst intern at your company.
Yes, but I imagine if you put a human inside a brain scanner, add a feedback loop that uses AI, then you can generate novel stuff with the human being used to just passively rate the output of the AI. You could build a small farm with humans, and generate novel commercial music.
