This may be a little bit of a rant, but it's something I feel quite strongly about and affects everyone in music production.
Plugin companies have done a good job of tricking a lot people into thinking mastering is just stereo processing (or atmos/surround if you work in those fields). It's a lot more than that. Starting with quality control, sequencing - if you're making an album, and deliverables.
Deliverables can be a DDP, vinyl sides, cassette sides, Apple Digital Masters, video masters... the list goes on, all of which only a mastering engineer can properly provide. In theory DIY artists, producers, mix engineers could take the time to learn all of this. But in general these people are not aware all these formats need different and nuanced levels of preparation, mastering and quality checking. This is something that neither AI or plugins can do.
This is not considering the original creative touch a good mastering engineer can bring to a record. Having an emotional response to your music and acting upon it is invaluable. Emphasis on 'original' (looking at you AI).
A professional mastering engineer (someone who specialises in this role) will pick up mistakes a mixer has missed because they have heard the project too many times and lost that objectivity to hear the songs for the first time - just as an audience is hearing it. I can't tell you how many clicks, pops and audible edits I've caught over the years, even from seasonsed professional mixers. Good auto QC software such as that used in broadcast can't identify some of these errors (at the time of writing this). You need a human ear, and even after auto QC is used lots of clients will still pay for a human ear/eyeball QC.
When it comes to deliverables the same applies as above. I think it will be a long time before clients and labels will trust AI to know how to make reliable vinyl pre masters or check a DDP. Never mind sending them off to a pressing plant to make hundreds or thousands of physical media without a human being checking the final deliverables.
Then you have the subject of: do you want your music to sound original? I recently spoke to Matt Boudreau on the Working Class Audio podcast about this topic. AI can only emulate what has come before. Collaborating with another creative person who can bring their own vibe and taste to your record can make something completely new, and that is a wonderful thing that for the time being you still need human interaction to accomplish.
This may come across as someone trying to save their own role in the music industry from the ongoing march of AI into creative pursuits. I'd like to think of it more as trying to keep some artistic integrity in the creative process of making music, that we all care so deeply about.
AI and Plugin companies have a vested interest in getting musicians to fork out for software that replaces humans, so that they can get a quick buck. They have a reason to convinve you that plugins or AI mastering are the same as a human, but the truth is they just aren't. And I'm not sure they ever will be.
To my ears, when i've listened to AI or AI assisted mastering it sounds amateur. Human mastering is dynamic, fresh and emotional. Yes, I would like for myself and the people I care about to keep the jobs we love, but most of all I want to protect the world against bland, unoriginal and badly mastered songs, we all deserve better than that.
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