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.

I think the same. Many artists hate because they feel threatened. I think the opposite: creating art (e.g. Drawing) was only for the ones who had drawing skills. Now, it's being democratized and everyone, regardless of being talented in drawing or not, can freely express their feelings and creativity.

I think it's a great thing.

Training ESRGAN, I quickly learned that AI sniffs artifacts humans can't see. And I got particularly funky results training a model on selected previous generation upscales.

Hence I disagree. Even of the training data curators are perfect, there is a risk of "model inbreeding."

And the curators are not perfect. In fact, they seem to prioritize (by necessity) volume and speed over quality and curation when training these LLMs and diffusion models.

I’m not sure what the last line says. Doesn’t the top 99% do better than the rest? I think you are making the common HN argument that it is “ableist” to think doing art should require any kind of skill or something. I don’t really agree that the AI is so good but let’s say it is, if that’s the case why do you think anyone will afford a computer to use the AI or even a house in which to type or say all these magic prompts?