[EForEndeavour]

One the one hand, I agree that it feels scummy that so much AI effort is devoted to mimicking human creative output. I strongly believe that as AI-generated images, sounds, and even films continue to improve and proliferate into products and services, a good chunk of people will actively try to boycott AI output, seeking out alternatives that are (somehow) certified to be 100% human-produced (Ah, but the tools those humans need will also become more AI-powered...). There will be a growing humanist movement devoted to protecting "essentially human" qualities, such as creativity, from automation.

My attempt to be pragmatic: the AI art genie is out of the bottle. There's no going back. Even if all AI art progress were magically reset to 0 today, it would arise again at some point as people retried to create software in their image. We need to figure out how to adapt to a world in which the barriers to creating "good" art (however you choose to define "good") are far lower.

The central problem as I see it: the faster than bigger the tech advance, the more unintended and unpredictable societal consequences it will have. Laws come to mind as the main tool to mitigate uses of tech that are collectively deemed harmful. But compared to the pace of AI progress, laws will crawl lightyears behind where they need to be.