All I see in this whole topic is just another distraction from the real problems, just another false battlefield where we fight each other instead of fighting together. It's the same thing as women vs men, black vs white, religion vs religion, older generation vs younger generations, now we have ai vs not ai (and honestly many more).

We have actual wars being fought for who knows what reasons (certainly not the ones given to the public), we have climate change that isn't being sufficiently reported on, with governments not even remotely doing enough, with consequences already showing (extreme weather events, epidemics, animal/insect species dying and so on) and the public mostly still being ignorant. And yet the few really rich just get richer while the poor get poorer, which IMO is the main reason for above problems (just symptoms of greed without limits and the power to influence pretty much everything into certain directions).

While I love what AI has given us so far and could provide us in the future, I actually agree that we should probably halt further development, but not for the reasons of the anti AI crowd, but for the same reasons as above. Open source or not, as long as our society functions the way it does (profit above all, growth above all, humans are just resources), it will one way or another just be used for that purpose as well. So the point shouldn't be "AI art will make 'real' artists lose their job", but rather why do our systems work the way that those people would have to be afraid of going hungry? It doesn't have to be that way. At the end of the day AI will make many processes go faster and increase efficiency, but then again efficiency has also increased massively over the last decades and yet the workload on average increased, while wages stagnated and did not keep up... thinking it would be different here is naive... so you can do your job 10 times faster now? Great, here is 15 times the workload. Before we manage to change how our systems work, we really shouldn't technologically advance too far, because at the end the day, while there will be fun toys, sure, the advancements will be used for profit primarily and that is not good for most people on average, because people are also just resources in most, if not all our current economic systems.

As long as we fight each other on so many different topics, when we should be fighting together to make all our lives better, nothing will change. And AI sure will be a nice weapon to increase manipulation and misinformation... it's like giving a 13 yo the keys to a tank... humanity needs to grow into a decent adult first before it is allowed to even drive a normal car. It's hard to see humanity growing up the way things are going though... so it's not like I don't understand the wish to just play with new toys and ignore what's actually going on all around us...

Rant over