If AI replaces musicians, does the entire plugin industry die with them?

[VOODOO U]

Read the scripture.

I'd rather go to hell.

[enroe]

An A.I. prompt user is not a musician. Just someone who likes to lie to himself.

That brings us neatly back to the topic.

[Gamma-UT]

If a song takes a year or so until it's good enough then it's not good enough. It's a leech sucking on you with precious little tidbits and it needs to be burned alive. Get rid of it.

It's No Game, the song that bookends Scary Monsters, spent a decade or more in Bowie's notebooks. The melody began with one of his early songs and went through a bunch of revisions before it mutated into the two different versions on the album. The lyrics were also completely different: it was originally about suicide.

The idea that all end results come easily from an initial idea just doesn't match how much art really gets made. A lot of stuff comes from sketches that need to be reworked and refined to make them work. Sometimes it's the original idea that gets junked in the final product but if you're just burning everything that doesn't work instantly, you're just making things even more difficult for yourself. Not least because you're not learning how to differentiate from good and bad ideas. Or ideas that don't work for the particular song you're working on. There are plenty of other examples of ideas getting pulled from one song and dumped into a notebook to be used elsewhere because they just didn't work in the original.

This is why generative AI pretty much doesn't work: it doesn't support a way of working that lets you pull the bits apart. All you can do is write a different prompt and hope it keeps something you liked from the first prompt. The chances are the AI will do as you suggest and burn the original while copying elements from a different bunch of songs.