This an incredibly interesting conversation y'all are having -- you've hit on the biggest issues we're going to grapple with in this new phase of media.

I myself am really intrigued by what these new AIs can do. I've played around with the code-generating ones (I'm a hobbyist coder), the language-generators, and (less, but a bit) with the art generators.

My current sense is that they have the potential to be damn interesting tools for new human creativity -- i.e. to provide new materials for me to create with. But they're not quite yet being designed that way. What I'm looking for is not a tool that autogenerates complete things, but which offers me new techniques for expressivity on top of what I'm already doing. I want a weird new type of synthesizer, not a CD of already-written music, if that metaphor makes any sense.

The bigger problem with generative AI producing entirely new works at the push of a button -- or the writing of a prompt, more specifically -- is that generative AIs are inherently conservative; I mean "conservative" not in the contemporary sense of partisan politics, but conservative as in "dedicated to replicating the patterns of the past". This makes them a little ... dull, creatively? To my eyes?

All the more reason for me to want them to be fashioned as tools that work with a direction my creative mind is already going, rather than offering supposed creativity at the push of a button ...