I remember people saying that AI was going to displace artists because they overhead business managers saying how great it was that they no longer had to hire a

I remember people saying that AI was going to displace artists because they overhead business managers saying how great it was that they no longer had to hire a human artist for a design job. In other words, had there been an option to forgo the human in the first place, the human artist would never have stood a chance to take such a job. I think this reveals a depressing fact. The desire to automate humans away has always existed, and now people can finally realize those dreams. Maybe even prompt engineering itself is in that sense a bottleneck to be overcome in the future, if a human still has to attend to constructing it? I don't think "artificial intelligence" is a good term for describing what's happening right now. It makes it sound like a robot overlord is calling the shots and displacing human workers, but in reality, it's just humans pitted against humans with different beliefs. AI tools still require humans that believe in the proliferation of AI to use them and spread the results everywhere. I agree with the article's mention that maybe some reflection is needed when proliferating new discoveries. The "just a tool" argument doesn't consider that what affordances a new technology offers will dictate what most people will use it for in practice. I don't think many people would argue that nuclear weapons are "just a tool" once their uncontrolled spread makes them impossible for any side to ignore. And the dangers aren't yet on a "destruction of humanity" level like many who worry about AGI, but perhaps "the destruction of humanity in the arts" is more plausible given the recent developments up to now? We aren't even close to anything resembling AGI yet, but specific domains are still vulnerable to being overrun by AI generation this early on (StackOverflow, ArtStation, etc). But this is a matter of tradeoffs, and maybe researchers will continue to be overeager in sharing their exciting findings, until an even more severe line is crossed than the one that set off the current war on AI art. I don't look forward to a time where demonstrators will scrape GitHub listings and arXiv papers to seek out contributors to anything that touches OpenAI or Stability and implore them to have a change of heart, or scream louder and louder to have their voices heard by the programmers writing their torch denoising code from inside the safety of their office buildings.