What will people do with this tool exactly, once it's a mature tool? It doesn't sound like it will require much in the way of human guidance at some point down the line.
Oh come on. Amplitude, envelopes, equalizing, balancing the audio.
If this were a professional production that needed to be matched up with two voice tracks and background music, the sound designer will use the AI to create the sound for the background events... but still needs to balance the various audio tracks so that the audience knows what to focus on.
The abstract subway sound in the background may be chosen by an AI rather than a human. But the human will still need to determine the amplitude of the various voice tracks, the background music. Its not like these films make themselves.
Even IF somehow an AI became good enough to make all those decisions (and most of those decisions are more "style" and "art" rather than hard-and-fast rules)... the video editor needs to choose the cuts, the order of the scenes and more.
No jobs will be at risk by this tool. If successful, it'd only become one more tool in the MASSIVE toolbox that video editors / sound designers are expected to master.
-----------------------
Anyway, "Tweening" AI completely eradicated one form of work for cartoonists. Humans aren't doing "tweening" work anymore. Big studios are making 3d productions where AIs can "tween" everything for you. Even 2d anime are using 3d animation techniques to cut down on the work and to leverage the AI.
It takes no work to command the AI to "tween" frames. But picking the right algorithm, deciding when to use "smear" animation style (stylized tweening) or changes to algorithms to switch things up for the audience?
Yeah, those things will always just be straight up work.
You are looking at this from such as simplistic perspective.
We are not at the limits of what machine learning can do, We are barely at the beginning.
Tweening or "make sound that can fool humans" is not what's important here it's the underlying "mechanics" that allow them to do these things which can be applied to so many other areas.
What make humans extraordinary is that we can combine our various mechanical and intellektuel abilities to adapt to our surroundings. What we are witnessing is another "species" who can do this and is only at the beginning.
I spent two years of my life writing an automated logic system for a professor. Trust me, I know what AI can and can't do.
In my experience, when AI reaches the critical mass of usefulness, it becomes a tool within the industry. Automatic solving of logical puzzles? Yeah, electrical engineers use PSpice to optimally lay out logic gates in CPU Chips.
Automated logic can be used to verify extremely complicated mathematical proofs, or even search for new mathematical truths! So what happens? Well... some company creates a product with the AI, then sells it as a tool.
We exist in an age where AIs are responsible for searching and coalescing information. (Erm, how often do you use Google's database?) It wasn't very long ago when search was considered an AI problem... but as soon as computers successfully do it better than humans, its a "tool" and "not AI" anymore.
The last 50 years of AI history has taught me one thing: when AIs are successful, humans change and stop thinking that the task was "intelligent". Chess as a measure of intelligence? No longer, once Chess AIs got good.
Database search? No longer, now that Google is faster than humans.
Automated driving? Was an AI task, now it isn't one. People are already discussing how its a tool for Truckers or Uber to use to make more money.
-------------
"Intelligent tasks" become "tasks for tools" because thats how stuff sells on the market. You wouldn't believe what people thought was "intelligence" in the 80s. Chess, Databases Search / Natural Language Processing, automated logic, symbolic mathematical solvers, chip layouts, compiler optimizations... and everything that we just take for granted today.
Similarly, the tasks we consider "intelligence" today will simply turn into tools for the next generation once the AIs are written that solve that problem.
You are IMO making the same mistake Searle made in his "Chinese Room" argument.
Your digestive system is a tool for you to get rid of garbage your system does not need, your neurons are tools for allowing you to ultimately think, your legs are tools for allowing you to move around.
It's the entire system thats relevant here. Not any of the individual subparts.
And we are not talking about what it can or can't do but it's potential.
You brush this off as a humans will always find a way... which is what I am objecting to.
Whether you spend 2 or 20 years writing automated logic systems for a professor is unimportant.
As a sound editor with 2 decades of first doing it for fun and then for a career I don't think that balancing the tracks is uniquely human and immune from automation.
This isn't going to lead to some new golden age of well-produced soundtracks, it's just going to make big bombastic soundtracks cheaper and more common. For a few years everything is going to sound like a disaster movie. Some would argue that we've already got that problem and I can't entirely disagree.
In short, quality won't go up, prices will go down and oversupply will result in excess.
