A magnitude of difference, yes. Even a printing press will be limited by natural resources, which require humans to procure.
A computer server can do a lot more with a lot less. And is much easier to scale than a printing press.
>Even if human's can't compete (An obviously untrue premise from my perspective, but lets assume it for the sake of argument), is that a bad thing?
When the AI can be argued to be stealing human's work, yes. A printing press didn't need to copy Shakespeare to be useful. And it'd benefit Shakespeare anyways because more people get to read about his works.
So far I don't see how AI benefits artists. Optimistically:
-an artist can make their own market? Doubtful, they will be outgunned by SEO optimized ads from corporations.
- they can make commissions faster? To begin with commissions aren't a sustainable business. Even if they 5x the labor and somehow kept the same prices they aren't living well. But in reality, they will get less business as people will AI their "good enough" art and probably won't pay as much for something not fully hand drawn
- okay, they can make bigger commissions? There's a drama about spending 50k on a 3 minute AMV, imagine if that could be done by a single artist in a day now!... Well, give it another 10 years. Lot of gen Ai is static assets. Rigging or animating is still far from acceptable quality, and a much harder problem space. I also wouldn't be surprised if by then any AI models has its own phase of enshittification and you end up blowing hundreds, thousands anyway.
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>Humans should not be forced to pointlessly toil out of protectionism when they could be turning their attention to something that can't be automated.
Until someone conceptualizes a proper UBI scheme, pointlessly toiling is how most of the non-elite live. I have yet to hear of a real alternative for these misplaced artists to move towards.
So what? So we all just become managers in meetings in 30 years?