Finding a lot of the discussions about GPT/DALL-E style AI uncomfortable because this is one of those things, like self-driving electric cars, that should be exciting news and some real "we did it, we're living in Star Trek" stuff. More capability for less work is a good thing! I don't want to be the guy who complains the printing press is taking away work from our beloved mom and pop scriptoria! And there are some people in the discussions who kind of sound like that. Not only is it kind of anti-progress to have humans doing redundant busywork purely to keep them employed, it's simply not going to happen.
However. Human artists are not doing redundant busywork right now, because they have uniquely human skills like "counting to five" and "drawing the same face twice." Kind of like how human writers can fact-check and human drivers can distinguish between a traffic light and the Moon. This AI stuff would be super cool and change society forever if it worked as promised, which it absolutely does not.
(But is it getting there? Will it be better than humans in the future? Then I will change my opinion in the future.)
Also, right now the people backing AI the loudest are a very specific kind of insufferable asshole. If you've ever made justifications for non-public-domain material being used as training data, you almost certainly think Elon Musk is going to take us to Mars, monkey JPEGs are the new stock market, and wokeness has gone too far. And this sucks in much the same "it would be Star Trek if it weren't shit" way as the tech itself. These are, in a certain lens, people who are excited about new technology! They should be forward-thinking and open-minded! I'm a geek, these should be my people! But instead they're sneering "have fun being poor, pronouns in bio" at me.
So in both ways, there's this promise of a cool new techno-future, and the heartbreak of finding none of it works and everyone involved sucks and that... that kind of gets to me. A younger me really wanted to believe technical progress and social progress could go hand in hand, that new technology is fun and cool and makes people's lives better. It honestly hurts to see so much prominence (and funding!!!) taken up by this sick parody of technological advancement.
