Agreed. And I want to go a bit further to talk about why else this might be bad.

Some people believe that losing jobs to AI is fine, because it means society is more efficient; and that it gives people time to do other things. But I think there are a few major flaws in that argument. For a lot of people, their sense of purpose and sense of self, and their source of happiness comes from their art and their creativity. We can say “they can just do something else” but we’ve basically just making their lives worse. Instead of being paid and valued for making art; they can get paid for serving coffee or something… and perhaps not have as strong of a sense of purpose or happiness. Even if we somehow eliminate inequality, and give everyone huge amount of free-time instead of works, it’s still not clear that we’ve made it better. We just get people mindlessly scrolling on social media instead of creating something.

That’s just one angle. Another angle is that by removing the kind of jobs that AI can do well, we remove the rungs on the ladder that people have been using to climb to other higher-level skills. An artist (or writer, or programmer, or whatever else), might start out by doing basic tasks that an AI can do easily; and then build their skills to later tackle more complex and difficult things. But if the AI just takes away all opportunities that are based on those basic tasks, then people then won’t have those opportunities to build their skills.

So… if we put too much emphasis on speed & cost & convenience, we may accidentally find ourselves in a world where people are generally less happy, and less skilled, and struggle to find a sense of value or purpose. But on the plus side, it will be really easy to make a picture of a centaur girl or whatever.

I consider this a problem of capitalism, not synthetic art.

Tough to say, but as an artist/writer myself, I’d still be in charge of what I want for my material. An artist knows what works and what doesn’t.

I used ChatGPT to give me a list of character names based on the description I gave it. I usually select one from dozens of choices, oftentimes mixing and matching, or giving more information for a new list. Someone else may not care and pick the first name they see.

Same goes with plot and dialogue. An artist will go back and forth with the A.I. to make improvements and decisions… whereas a non-artist might not know which one to pick and let A.I. do most of the work.

Then yes, that all might come down to a certain percentage of work, like 50% or more as an example. An artist will want their own voice to be shown so they’ll have a higher percentage of their work included, whereas a non-artist won’t care and just try to sell A.I. work as their own. The artist will have more say for copyright. Proving it will be difficult however… as teachers have found when grading students papers. Artists may need to keep a lot of notes during the creative process.