I think it’s a mistake to equate the previous concerns with the ones today. Really what you’re doing above really only boils down to the following essentially: “Well, people were scared before and were wrong then, therefore the people that are scared now are wrong now”. That’s the essence of the argument.
Why did people fear the synth? Because it had patches with names like “strings” or “drums”. Did it sound like the real thing in the beginning? Not even close. Did it end up sounding like the real thing? Definitely.
But not only that, we moved on from replacing a string quartet for some background pads with a pianist playing samples to “anyone” being able to execute all sorts of articulations… with the computer executing it all flawlessly…
And from that we’ve moved to people just clicking on a graphic to get the next chord, with the computer automatically revoicing to match the chord.
When I started out engineering in NYC in 2001 we’d hire a drummer, bass player, guitarist and singers for every commercial we recorded. And that was like all the time. The last year I’ve probably done two recording sessions with real instruments, and the rest was programmed.
Musicians didn’t magically disappear from earth as that happened, but the studio-musician scene got decimated.
So now we’re looking at the next logical step which is for AI to do even more of the composition task as well as the production task. That’s the next frontier.
Again; I totally get how people who don’t have a real stake in this are completely unbothered by it, but everyone who makes a living on these things should be worried about their future. AI is already starting to replace copywriters in some industries, an AI image won a photo competition and so on.
The only shadenfreude that makes me feel somewhat better is that a lot of the people who ‘sociopathically’ couldn’t care less if others get unemployed because of this are going to suffer themselves and just lack enough imagination to see it (not talking about you).