It doesn't. But fast food and pre-cooked meals made it so a large percentage of people can't cook with raw or unprocessed ingredients anymore and can only rely on giant companies to feed themselves.
Junk food is OK every once in a while, but if that's all you eat you're not going to be healthy. I believe the same is true for the media you consume.
Edit: Also, to add to your analogy, junk food made it so people's palates became accustomed to high amounts of sugar, fat and salt, to a point where some people "Don't like water". If you've only known pizza rolls and chicken tenders, you're unlikely to enjoy a chicory salad or a even a moussaka. And if all your entertainment is call of duty, marvel movies and AI generated music, you're unlikely to enjoy Weather Report, Rachmaninoff or Pynchon. I'm not saying that to to be elitist, but we've got to stop dumbing down culture and entertainment
See: Synthesizers, Digital Synthesizers, overdriven guitars, reverb effects (instead of recording in special rooms), Midi, Multitrack recording, studio musicians, overdubbing, digital recording, autotune.
Every time anything comes out that makes music production easier people bitch about it. Never fails.
I've personally made 3 albums back in my teenage years using nothing but a microphone, a computer, instruments that I played, and friends. I know how hard it is and how much it sucks to not be good enough for others to care about your music that you put your heart and soul into.
I agree that anyone who tells a computer to make them a song and then calls it their song is full of shit.
BUT
If someone writes the lyrics to a song and wants to hear the ways it could sound like, that's still art.
If someone generates a backing track and then performs over it, that's still art. After all, almost every social media influencer turned musician did exactly that, buying the "beat" and then performing over it, and they still get millions of views and sometimes even perform their fancy karaoke for crowds of adoring fans.
There is a line and it is a very clear one. If a human is involved in a critical portion of the song's creation, it's art. If not, it's slop.
> See: Synthesizers, Digital Synthesizers, overdriven guitars, reverb effects (instead of recording in special rooms), Midi, Multitrack recording, studio musicians, overdubbing, digital recording, autotune.
All of those required critical thinking and knowledge from musicians
The issue is not that an artist will use AI to split tracks on an album to practice, or use AI to come up with grooves for their VSTs, the issue is that you have AI bands on streaming platforms hoping to make money. Small magazines, publications etc (see clarkesworld) are being flooded by AI slop because people want to make a quick buck. Big players want nothing more than being able to prompt a model and get free hits with nobody to credit or pay royalties to.
This is elitist bullshit. I've been a musician my entire life and made a decent living doing it. People can choose to listen to whatever they want and it's not your job to police what kind of music people can or can't make or what people can choose to listen to.
If I was elitist then I would want as few people as possible to have access to "high culture", not to open it to the highest possible number. There is a reason our elite really wants us to enjoy the most mindless crap possible, it's because they don't see us as thinking, feeling beings but cash cows and if we can buy music they generate in batch with a computer then the better. We need to push the other direction so we don't end up like a bunch of geese lining up for force feeding. I'm also not policing what anyone does btw, you do you, that doesn't keep me from saying that AI generated music for entertainment purpose is crap.
