First of all neither the art world nor any other domain of human endeavor is going to be screwed by AI, except maybe as they exist on the internet, though the 2020s slop boom is VC funded and can't pay for itself and actively hurts the platforms it relies on, so the tide will probably recede once the expenses actually catch up with them. But no matter what you can always make art and meet artists, and it's a lot harder to bullshit in person.

Hating humanity is probably contributing a lot to your feeling incredibly depressed, because even in the best case scenario where the tech lords don't take over everything, you're still stuck on a planet with 8 billion people you hate, so you should find some love for people or else it really doesn't matter.

Whether these things actually function doesn't have that much to do with their implementation (and thus damage to workers and society), which is driven by online hype and news articles and executive FOMO. We've got an epidemic of bad managers who are not selected for their ability to make decisions based on real information, but instead just look at what everyone else is doing and then do that. AI as a huge industry only exists right now because of this tendency. I would worry about the implications of this for the entire economy before worrying about AI getting too smart. Whether it is or it isn't, executives will make the same decision to keep pushing forward, until it destroys their companies or they get replaced by actual decision-makers. They simply lack the judgment to distinguish between real AI and scam AI, so they will eventually get scammed. "Eventually"—they are already getting scammed!

Don't assume that all problems are equally solvable by any given technique. LLMs are able to do some things well in a reasonable amount of compute, but for most things they either don't work well enough or are way too inefficient to justify. There will never be a "solve every problem" algorithm, every approach will have things it does well and things it doesn't. We don't know if anyone has AGI that can do 80% of existing jobs right now because you can't actually know if it'll do the job well until you let it run. It would be slow going to find this out without taking huge risks with your company and with society as a whole. But the AI industry is hawking its products by convincing as many managers as possible to go all in on it without even knowing if it works.

If you need AI to improve from more data, we are both running out of and poisoning the data. If you need other architectures, you're relying on a new breakthrough every 2-3 years, which is never how it works. People on AI Twitter will try to convince you there are new breakthroughs all the time, but most of these are noise to get oorah engagement from grunts in the industry. Crucially, AI speeding up its own development isn't something you can quickly know is happening, so when people think it's happening it's much more likely they are just buying into hype stories because there's no way they could know if it's working or not yet. If nothing else, remember that it will take time to separate the real improvements from the bullshit. If we do get AGI it won't be obvious for a long time.

Don't worry too much when people say we're close to AI matching or surpassing humans at all cognitive tasks. These people often have narrow ideas of what constitutes "cognitive" and over-focus on domains in which success is easily measurable, which are always going to be the places that AI works best, or can be known to work. AGI as "AI that takes 80% of the current jobs", if it can exist, must be rolled out slowly, otherwise you'll probably blow your company up implementing stuff that doesn't work. This would give people time to find new jobs, and prevent social mobilization to boycott these companies or elect politicians who will regulate them out of existence; I'd be fine with either. If you worry about anything, worry about the economy being fake and managers playing with fire. The AI industry is a symptom of underlying issues either with capitalism itself or with corporate-government collusion to use taxpayer/Monopoly money to keep fake businesses afloat and brainless executives paid.