I don’t get this. AI bros talk about how “in the near future” no one will “need” to be a writer, a filmmaker or a musician anymore, as you’ll be able to generate your own media with your own parameters and preferences on the fly. This, to me, feels like such an insane opinion. How can someone not value the ingenuity and creativity behind a work of art? Do these people not see or feel the human behind it all? And are these really opinions that you’ve encountered outside of the internet?
I can appreciate a sunset or a flower without needing these things to have “a human behind it all”.
With that said, art is far from the most important potential application of AI. I am merely amused that right now I can ask a computer to draw a cow in the style of Monet and get a pretty good result. The amazing thing is not present-day capability (which is remarkable but not world-changing) but rather what the rate of progress implies about the near future. I think that a computer better than any human at everything (or at least at every intellectual task) is likely within my lifetime.
It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine.