The comment on gaming is interesting. I'll admit I'm not into Soulslike games, but to be fair they do, in a sense, bring us back to the way games used to be. There was no "save" in arcade games or, in general, Atari/ColecoVision games. Hell, it was even rare to see on NES or Master System games. There wasn't even a checkpoint or progress saved on the character like Soulslike games do now. You just had to play it all from the start. Of course, the games were nowhere near the length of modern games, so you're not talking about a "lot" of game to play. I'd honestly also say that the bigger concept that game developers are chasing now is "live service" games where you can only really play it as PvP or PvE. This comes with it's own issues (and the fact that almost all of them will fail because Fortnite is just too "big").

In terms of music, I'll jump on my old guy soapbox here and say the frustrating part of music now is that, with autotune and other digital enhancement methods so much music sounds the same now. When a group had bad singers back in the day they owned it and made it work. Groups like XTC, Violent Femmes, The Ramones, etc, etc had notoriously bad singing but iconic music where you immediately knew it was them and the songs really worked. I like a number of current songs, but honestly if I didn't know it from someone telling me, I couldn't tell you if a song was sung by Katy Perry, Taylor Swift, Billy Eilish or any number of singers. Same goes for Maroon 5, Jonas Brothers, One Direction or any number of groups. I think part of it has to do with the "chorus" they throw on all their voices for just about every song.

The issue of movies is a tricky one now. I think the real problem movies face is there are just too many. In the past there were perhaps two or three new movies coming out in the theater and the only movies made for TV were low grade "Sunday Night Specials". Looking at last weekend there were 10 movies released in theaters, in addition to who knows how many on streaming. Add to this the fact that there is a LOT of independent video content to consume on the internet and I think people are just overwhelmed with too much. It makes it very difficult for a lower budget, not mass marketed movie to really stand out so people want to see it in the theater. By the time it hits streaming, you don't know which of the dozens of services it ended up on and you've ended up forgetting about it. I know there are movies out there where I saw a trailer and thought "that seems cool, I'll watch it when it hits Netflix" but then it either goes to some service I don't have, or it's not promoted when it does hit a service I have so I didn't even know it was there.

I think this is where AI is gaining popularity. There's so much of the "same stuff" being created out there, and the reason people consumed it was because they weren't capable of making it themselves. The average person isn't a musician, a director, a writer, an artist, or a photographer, but everyone has "ideas". Now, with AI tools they can input concepts they've had for things and get "something" back. It may not be good, but it's "theirs" so it's somewhat the new entertainment.

In the professional world, AI is handy because, honestly, there is a lot more to "create" now. Everything has become "bigger". Code for programs is more complex because it has to do a lot more than it did a couple of decades ago. This means more documentation for it. Teams are bigger, so more collaboration. There is a lot more art required for things, so making the art process more efficient is necessary. It definitely has it's place. I don't know that it will result in Skynet, but if "abused" I imagine the main risk is people getting to the point where there is nobody left that can do some of the things AI will be doing. AI as redundancy is fine, but AI as an outright replacement is the big risk.