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I agree. A parallel can be drawn between the invention of AI generated art and that of of optimizing compilers. They effectively replaced hand generated assembly code and I don't want to go back to a world where every programmer has to write their own assembly. It's much more productive to use higher level languages and reason about data structures and control flow, not registers and jumps. And just like AI art generators can make better art than the average person, a compiler can generate better code than even a competent programmer used to high level languages.
This doesn't make an understanding of assembly and the intricacies of the various families of processors any less useful in the narrower domain of compiler design. So maybe a keen understanding of art will be no less useful in a world filled with AI generated art, where the true connoisseur will appreciate the hand crafted art, while the masses will happily stare at machine created images.
Another comparison is procedural generated. I'm perpetually disappointed by it in games like Dwarf Fortress or the randomly generated side quests that games like Borderlands use - not because a human didn't put effort into each individual character name and backstory or quest goal, but because they're bland and boring for the most part, and it soon becomes obvious that even though there is infinite variety on the surface level, it all operates under a rigid structure.
Rather ironic given your flair!
I like the technology, but I worry that this metaphor may not continue. In a world where computers just Did Everything for you in the programming and compsci spheres except the extraordinarily difficult exceptions, would many people be able to develop the interest or fundamental skills that eventually lead to a successful compiler design understanding? Or would their first genuine CompSci problem going to throw dependency hell at students that don't know what a file is, and they just turn around and say fuck it?
Sometimes it's chicken-sexing, sometimes it's a problem of available resource scaling (how do you train in your basement to run multi-million-user scale cloud?), sometimes it's a matter of developing the temperament to not throw computer monitors out windows. The First Step is a Doozy, and a lot of these skills are hard to learn and harder to understand what you have to learn.
It's plausible this won't happen. Past changes to CompSci haven't eliminated on-boarding opportunities, even if they've mangled many of them; artists have adapted structures to discourage bulk-scale tracing and seldom (have the specific tech skills to) take available 'traditional' automation tools to their maxima. Music is different than it was a hundred years ago, but it's not lacking steps for the garage band. Even if it does happen, there will always be the auties and the paranoid and the slightly nuts who hypnotize themselves into doing in the old-fashioned way.
And yet, there are skillsets that are lost, at least to country-scales. If you wanted to rebuild Saturn rockets pre-SpaceX, you'd have to start by rebuilding the entire aerospace industry (and might still today). There's a lot of woodworking techniques that have turned into gimmicks, shown only by weirdos on YouTube because you'd have to scour auction sites to even find the tools in the right quality to have a chance to learn the trick, because a trim router can do the easier variants and no one finds the hard ones worthwhile. There are classes of power transformer that can’t be made in IGBT or MOSFET forms due to physical constraints, and when the last guy who knows how to make the vacuum tube version retires, I doubt we build up a whole infrastructure to support a replacement.
And there's only so much confidence that induction can give you, in a case where the Type II errors are invisible.
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I agree with what you say here. The way I see it, what AI is is the decoupling of art-as-status from art-as-product. People value the labor of prestigious artists because that artist has a monopoly on good artistic output. They respect the work so far as dedication is necessary to hone a craft, but if they could snap their fingers and make fantastic <music/video games/character portraits/illustrations for their novel/whatever>, they would, gladly.
Once the masses can produce art that satisfies aesthetic preferences, the status-artists will lose a huge market share. It's understandable why they'd bitch and moan, but it's the gurgling of a dying creature.
One must crush their enemies to enjoy the peace of a world without enemies.
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