My girlfriend has been using an AI music generator and like, her music is the best generative music I've listened to. Her prompts are crazy, lots of actual like, music theory and specific requests.

That said, it still shares these qualities. It sounds like AI images look. Oversmoothed/overtuned.

Like as a creative myself, what AI has taught me more than anything is that a lot of what we call artistry happens in the friction between an artist and their tools, when they're pushing to the limit of what they know how to and what their tools are able to do, that's where the great shit is. And it's not even that AI is a bad tool necessarily, it just doesn't create any friction. It can be frustrating, for sure, when you just can't get it to do what you want, but it's not an interesting frustration like friction because you aren't the problem, nor your skill: the tool is the problem.

That probably sounds like I'm saying it's bad and again, no. I'm saying the friction between the artist and their tools is the interesting part, and because there's very little friction, meaningfully, between artists and AI tools, it just comes out... boring.

The push for generative AI is "you can make anything," and that's true. But if you can make anything, then by necessity, anything you make is unimpressive. It's only really impressive if you're not sure if you can make it.