The economic system is what he’s talking about here. That was my point. The entire conversation from the side against this stuff has always been about the economic situation of it. Without that factor, I think the only thing people would care about is whether or not their work is being used without their permission/maliciously.
As for Photoshop and photography, that’s actually why I brought those up specifically. Because they were feared as things that would destroy artists’ jobs and actually brought about entirely new fields of art - and also because they’re the two people bring up when people argue against LLM replacing people’s jobs, acting like they’re just some Luddites afraid of science.
Right now, the way I see it with AI is that there are 2 distinct groups benefiting from it: those whose workflow has been improved from the use of AI, and those who think AI can get them the result of work without having to either do the work themselves or pay somebody else to do it. And thanks to the economic issues that are at the heart of this whole thing, that second group is set to harm the number of people who can spend time creating things simply because they now have to work a job that isn’t creating things and no longer have the time to put towards that. So I can see AI creating a whole new art boom or a bust in equal measure. That second group is of concern to the art communities as well because they only see the destination and don’t see that the journey is just as important to the act of creation, and that is already causing schisms between artists and “prompters” who think that they’re just as skilled because they used a generator to make some cool stuff. People are already submitting unedited, prompted work to art and writing competitions.