> the skill ceiling is now higher than ever as a result

the fear from the current professionals is that the new ai raised floor is good enough to be usable commercially, and thus, cut a chunk of economic value from the professionals.

There is no fear that AI stops people with the intrinsic interest in creation to stop creating - their ceiling and productivity would sky-rocket as a result in fact. And it would be _these_ productions that wow an audience.

> minimum amount of skill to produce something passable

Look at the history of woodworking for inspiration.

It used to take human sweat to make flat straight surfaces. Something like a walmart flatpack bookshelf would have been VERY expensive to make 1000 years ago. Industrial tech made that cheap and ... now its seen as tacky and out of style and only for poors.

The result culturally this century is an avoidance of "plastic wood" finish, faux finishes and faux surface prep that look old and worn and hand scuffed, and a strange hipster fetish for "live edge" raw bark on finished product. Sure, in 1875 one might have predicted based on mass production trends that furniture in 2020s would be all right angles, smooth as glass mirror, photographic "ideal" woodgrain instead of real woodgrain, plastic-y lifetime thick film finish. But thats only for poor people who shop at walmart, nobody with money buys that stuff.

I suspect what AI can cheaply produce will rapidly culturally be considered lower class and trashy. Oh, sure, completely AI generated movies look very nice and sound very nice and are ever so trendy and well written, but special effects and yesterdays memes on todays big screen generated entirely by computer algorithm is only for poors. Now, us rich cognitive elites only attend live theater plays. Aspirational middle class types watch recordings of theater plays (admittedly maybe some AI generated). You wouldn't show off your 'wealth' and 'class' by taking a date to an AI generated movie, that would be insulting, you might take her to a live theater play... I'm sure there will be some AI incursion, maybe the lights will be run by AI or AI painted backdrops or some actors will lipsync their lines to AI, or roughly every 5 years we have to tediously suffer thru a new generation of rewritten modernized classics and it'll be worse in the future with AI... but in general human will be the status symbol because it'll be expensive.

I suspect being able to ask an AI to generate non-copyrighted commercial quality music will mean massive noise pollution (much like every room required 15 digital clocks in the 80s and every room required 15 super bright blue power LEDs in the 00s) followed by the only people making money in music will be live humans playing physical instruments.

Poor people try to get by and don't spend money and when they do it'll be on infinitely cheap AI commodities. Rich people spend money on unique stuff, not mass produced AI shovelware. Aspirational people spend money trying to look rich so they will spend all their money on non-AI stuff.

It is a tool only when used as a tool, in the sense you're talking about. For example, I can write a sentence, and being a non-native English speaker, I can tell there's something wrong with it but I just can't place my finger.

So I ask the AI to rephrase it for me. Now I can pick and choose an option from those the AI offered, or I can just keep my version if it turns out it's good enough. I feel this is an acceptable use, and you can still maintain authorship, just like book authors maintain authorship after an editor has overhauled their writing.

Your DAW example would work if DAWs could generate samples, beats, and whole songs by the click of a button. But are you truly the author, then?

There's a GIGANTIC difference between a hammer and a button that when clicked builds a cathedral.

i agree with the tool analogy. However there's something different between using a tool, and outsourcing the entire content production by only specifying the end result.

Whenever a customer ask me to develop an app, i don't consider that he did the job. I did it.

> As a consequence, though, the standards for mixing and mastering have gone up massively; people don't really tolerate bedroom recordings with $10 mics any more.

I don’t find this holds true for hip hop, the most streamed genre, whatsoever. There are countless examples of people making it big recording on a cheap mic in their mom’s bed room. One example is Chief Keef. A much more prominent example is Kanye who had terrible mixing on The Life of Pablo to the point where he released patches[0] for the album. He also recorded parts of Jesus is King on an iPhone[1]. To further the point, bootleg recordings and demo tapes of unreleased songs in artists’ back catalog continue to be popular with devoted fans. Average people like good music, even if the quality of the mixing and mastering is not stellar.

Even The Beatles released songs with minimal takes from a live rooftop performance on Let It Be; hardly an ideal recording set up. Although they surely had better mixing.

[0] https://archive.org/details/2016-the-life-of-pablo-updates

[1] https://genius.com/a/kanye-west-says-20-percent-of-jesus-is-...

Love the connection to home studios. Everybody was able to make more music much more easily - but it also inflated the music industry with a lot of mediocrity. So some will find ways to use AI for greatness, but most won’t.

The skill ceiling isn't higher. It's just in a different building next door to the current one. The same thing happened with the film to digital transition. The skill range didn't change, the set of skills itself changed.

> people don't really tolerate bedroom recordings with $10 mics any more

It's called bedroom punk now.