Even with the most advanced pre-genAI technology, making sounds and images is a manual craft that requires one to develop not just technical skill / tool knowledge, but the concepts to define and articulate what you actually want. Intentionality and vision. The “what you want” becomes more complex and nuanced just as much as the “what you can”, by necessity.
GenAI not only fills in the blanks for “what you want” based on a vague text prompt, with the lowest common denominator of its training data, it provides no means or motive to develop intentionality. In its current form, it’s a cognitive dead end, endlessly providing a statistically smudged shadow of the detailed knowledge and conceptual space that gave birth to the data it was trained on. A picture is worth a thousand words, and today’s cutting edge models still forgot most of them.
It could get better. But it could also stagnate in a very dystopian way if it discourages learning traditional art without becoming a real alternative that continues to produce artists and not just consumers.
These new AI tools have the potential to be more personally comprehensive and have more widespread adoption than slavery and other forms of servitude. The loss of skill (or lack of development) that the parent commenter is referring to has been discussed as widely as Hegel's master-slave dialectic to Idiocracy. Individuals and cultures that use these tools to replace the innate tools they have developed become qualitatively less sophisticated, unless they are pressured by some other external need, or their own self-mastery. I suspect we will have a mix of all these situations across fields and cultures that adopt these new AI tools, and will need to focus on not only making the tools better, but pressuring ourselves to be better (i.e., we replaced physical labor through previous tools, but have only partly accommodated that lack of physical development through gym culture, sports, and more back to the earth activities like hiking- personal transportation being one of the first things to get replaced by new tools like domesticated animals, bikes and cars). If it happens too fast, or we have other catastrophes, we might need to bring back non-military conscription focused on the environment (as in William James's lecture on the Moral Equivalent of War), in order to prop up our nation state and technological culture that it has provided the foundation for.
This is totally true, but the rate of this death has exploded with the advent of computers, and is accelerating as LLMs become more sophisticated.
At the very least, to me it seems like things are finally happening fast enough for humans to notice a trend. I think I read the phrase "faster than generational rate", meaning that things happen at a frequency that we can observe in our lifetimes (advent of computers is faster than generational, but the development of agricultural advances really isn't)
