[erganemic]

People aren't angry/worried because they don't have a competitive advantage any more--people are angry/worried because they sense (I think correctly!) that AI will eliminate the part of their work that they find enjoyable.

Artists, by and large, don't do art because they enjoy having art--they do art because they like /the process/ of producing art. If that process can be done faster and better by AI, then yeah, sure, they /might/ be able to still do art for a living (some artists will be able to leverage their experience to maintain an advantage; other, less flexible ones will lose work)--but the work they do will likely not be commensurate to the work they were doing before, and will likely be less enjoyable to them.

The thing that worries people about AI is that it'll make all creatives into middle-managers.

[VLM]

To me, creative fine woodworking is making a cool idea based on the world around me and experiences I've had that balances engineering needs with artistic form.

Then I spend 95% of my hobby time tediously sanding boards and applying finish and this is NOT the fun part of my hobby.

I will say the only time I've gotten compensation directly as been for the latter because nobody likes doing that stuff.

I'd say AI will make creatives into micromanaging middle managers, the type that gets way too involved in a critique of your every decision is still going to micromanage, they'll just be harassing an AI instead of humans.

Fundamentally the creative act of making book cover art has always been specification. You can say to an artist "make me a book cover looking like ..." or you can hire a guy and give him no direction and trust him to decide what to do. But the creative act was the specifying, not the mechanics of turning that idea into printing ready art.

Another problem you run into is AI is as currently produced, a groupthink enforcement technology, and most people will be turned off by that. The blandest least offensive corporate dining experience is likely McDonalds. How much do hipster foodies prefer going to McDonalds over ... anywhere else on the planet? AI can only create the ideal big mac, and you can make money shipping big macs, but only selling to poor people, everyone else wants something else, even if in a strict corporate inhuman sense its inferior in every way to a big mac.