For the FAANG companies, they do it in part so they can then turn around and make those flashy claims you see in headlines like “95% of ours devs use [insert AI product they are trying to sell] daily” or “60% of our code base is now ‘written’ by our fancy AI”.
Maybe we will lose low effort artists but gain great music by passionate people.
This is such a bizarre take.
I wouldn’t characterize musicians who depend on some financial return as “low effort” at all. Almost all the best musicians, going back to classical music and beyond, were dependent on their music as a source of income.
If anything, the people who do music as a side hobby are usually more “low effort” than those who actually make it their main career. And if artists can’t make money of their music anymore, we’ll really only get music from rich people who can afford the lessons, instruments, recording studio, production, etc. as an expensive hobby rather than a source of income.
This isn’t really an answer to the ‘universal negativity’, but for a somewhat reasonable analysis of the pros and (surprisingly high number of) cons as well as some interesting grey areas, there’s an old LWT episode on this topic: https://youtu.be/AJm8PeWkiEU
What an exciting time to be building software! With AI, we’re able to achieve production outages with unprecedented frequency!