I had never heard about temp tracks, but this makes so much sense. That's a powerful homogenizing force.

Same thing happens with games to some degree.

There are many stories from gaming about placeholder music becoming integral part of the game.

In original doom games Carmack and Romero loved Black Sabbath and listened it during testing amd working on the game. That led to now legendary doom ost.

During the development of Max Payne 2 Remedy used Poets of the fall song as a placeholder and in the end they decited they wanted it in to the game, but because they could not get in to agreement with the publisher, and because PoF members are just cool guys, they eventually made song just for the game to get around the licensing debucle. That song was later released as a single.

I remember hearing story about Brutal Legend having some licenced music as a place holder in meeting with investors and it lead that music ending in to the game.

Im writing this while im little busy, so everything is coming from my memory, without fact checking, so who ever is reading this take it with a pinch of salt.

I wonder if that's why so many sequences use "4 on the floor" arranged roughly around a 12 bar pattern, or a specific piece of classical music that the studio could have gotten from public domain

One way of looking at it is serving a vegan a vegan meal, after you slaughtered a cow for the first couple of tries. Some of the damage has already been done.

Also, we've had several kerfuffles already where GenAI "placeholders" were present in a released game, and caused plenty of outrage. It's far safer to never have those placeholders to begin with. Just draw up something ugly in Paint, at least it'll be plenty obvious you need to fix it before launching the game.

I've seen the argument that if you're generating an image and making some edits, you're robbing yourself of original concepts. Even if human hands do the editing you've already outsourced one of the most important parts.

If you acknowledge the problem with theft from artists, do you not acknowledge there's a problem with theft from coders? Code intended to be fully open source with licenses requiring derivatives to be open source is now being served up for closed source uses at the press of a button with no acknowledgement.

For what it's worth, I think AI would be much better in a post scarcity moneyless society, but so long as people need to be paid for their work I find it hard to use ethically. The time it might take individuals to do the things offloaded to AI might mean a company would need to hire an additional person if they were not using AI. If AI were not trained unethically then I'd view it as a productivity tool and so be it, but because it has stolen for its training data it's hard for me to view it as a neutral tool.

I recently used one "agentic 'AI'" to help writing unit tests. Was surprisingly productive with it; but also felt very dirty afterwards.

I often use it in programming to either layout the unit testsor do something that's repetitive like create entities or DTOs from schemas. These tasks I can do myself easily but they're boring and I will also make mistakes. I always have to check every single line and need to correct things, plus have to write one or two detailed prompts to make sure that the correct pattern and style is followed. It saves me a lot of time, but always tries to do more than it should: if it writes tests it will try and run them, and then try and fix them, and then try to change my code which is annoying and I always cancel all of that.

I find AI art and creative writing boring and I only really see these things as a tool to support being more efficient where applicable, and you also have to know what you're doing, just like using any other tool.