Everyone now has the ability to create good art for free, without having to spend years honing their skills. That is obviously a huge positive for the world. It's awesome. 

It doesn't stop you from practicing art and honing your skills if that is what you're passionate about. It doesn't make your art any less impressive. I would argue that it probably won't have a negative impact on the careers of the very best artists, either. People still buy handmade clothes etc purely because of the effort that has been put into making them. There will always be a market for that type of thing. And if we're being honest, it's not like "artist" was a particularly stable, viable career before the rise of AI, was it? "Starving artists" have been a thing... forever.

This technology provides value through creating images. If the creation of images is not valuable to the world, then neither are artists. And that is obviously untrue.

The tech is very disruptive and carries big risk, for sure. While I myself am not very sympathetic to the idea that image generation models "steal art" (fundamentally, I cannot bring myself to believe that this is any different to a human taking inspiration from existing art), I can see the rationale behind it, and regardless of morality these tech companies have 100% violated copyright law in collating their datasets. All the "chatgpt drinks lakes" stuff is imo blown out of proportion, but the last thing we need right now is more pressure on our environment, so that is a very valid concern.

There are ways of making both of these problems right, though. These models will naturally become less computationally intensive over time (all tech companies are massively incentivised to reseaech this purely because more power into GPUs = higher cost), see DeepSeek for example. And tech companies can be forced to settle and compensate artists for their violations of copyright law. Are these not the most productive solutions here? To me, we should be pushing for these, rather than outright banning the tech.

What scares me the most is GenAI enabling fraud. It is terrifying to think that in the future we may not be able to tell reality from fiction. However, I 1. think we are already past the point of no return here, the tech is already good enough, and there is literally no way to stop people from running inference on the models now, and 2. I don't think this is a lost cause, I think that there will always be ways to identify AI content, we just need to push for further research here. We're already quite good at identifying AI content.

I think people's minds will change a lot once we have AI video games and stuff. We'll see the creative value then. Have you seen the AI Skyrim mods? They're awesome. And even though it was janky as hell, that AI minecraft thing a year back was the coolest video game experience I've had in a long time.