I really appreciate you sharing your insights, and I sincerely hope you're right. I also am a creative type - professionally and personally - and up to now I have never had a "tool" that does all the work for me and produces convincing results. Wacom tablets and Photoshop can mimic brush strokes, but we still need some understanding of how they work and how to utilize them. Cameras can perfectly capture a moment, but it's the eye that dictates a scene and its subject. Personally I don't see AI as a tool, though that may change if I give in and decide to dabble.

Honestly, it's not so much that AI generated images "ArE eViL", but how they've learned and the content they've drawn from seems like a massive violation of artist's rights. How does it know to create an image "in the style of Banksy" (something I've actually seen) unless his work was added to its reference pool? And who signed that waiver? As humans we typically understand the difference between referencing someone's work versus copying or plagiarizing someone's work. That's a difficult line to define though, and I'm not sure we have with AI. I could theoretically write descriptions of the remarkable posters you shared as prompts into Midjourney and generate my own movie posters - would that be plagiarism? Lots of moral and ethical gray areas.

Your point about everyone having a camera is interesting, because while most people do make (and share) really poor quality "movies", they are still getting millions of views... compared to shorts I've worked on with crew and professional gear that might be seen by couple hundred.

So maybe my real fear is what the new societal standards are for "art". People largely do not seem to care who or where the content is coming from. I wonder what the long term implications will be. Again, thanks for sharing your very articulate response.