An AI tool is not going to produce higher quality work than a professional human.

Yes it will, because there will cease to be professional humans. If there’s no development pipeline, no one is going to achieve the pinnacle of art, because there’s no return on that investment. The AI will become better than any human, not by raising the standard by by kneecapping our ability to reach higher.

It’s ironic you chose to compare it to computers because we’ve seen that the generational decline in mathematical ability has fallen off a cliff as people now don’t even have to think about how numbers work. We have college graduates with zero reading comprehension or writing ability because they’ve never had to independently develop those skills. We have vanishing competency in critical analysis and the ability to carry a dialogue at levels that were considered natural and intrinsic a handful of generations ago. Everywhere we see the constant erosion of the capability of achieving objectives that are less than a generation removed from us. We’re not talking about forgetting how to knap flint or the decline of the buggy whip maker. We’re talking about the intrinsic capacity of the human mind to engage with the world suddenly becoming an investment on which there is no chance of return in a single human lifetime, because there is no economically sustainable path from raw novice to professional.

AI will absolutely surpass us, not by raising the bar, but lowering it into hell under a firehose of garbage.

Sure, if you built an AI on your own machine, trained it entirely on public commons and voluntarily obtained data with the active consent, and powered it entirely on solar power and wind turbines, to do jobs without intrinsic value to human development, people would have a lot fewer objections to it. But you didn’t. And you won’t, because it would take resources that exceed anything you have available to do so. Much like genetic modification, there are motives and methods that potentially have real value, but they don’t tend to have significant return on investment and so are simply not done, and what is done ranges from suspect to objectively exploitative. You cannot create an ethical AI in the current environment, if such a thing is even possible.

“Quickly” is relative. We can move more quickly than we are certainly, while maintaining the forethought to prevent unnecessary harm, but we have to take a balanced approach. We don’t want to let perfect become the enemy of the good, but we also don’t need to make mistakes that cost us more down the road than we ever benefit from the development in the first place.

Or, better idea, stop using AI for creative work people find genuine personal fulfillment in, and eliminating any pathway to excellence. If you can’t afford to pay real people to create genuinely human artistic works, you’re a terrible business person and deserve to fail. It doesn’t make you a “Genius Creative” finding shortcuts to success, it makes you a pathetic hack with no independent talent, a parasite, and a miserly cheapskate on top of that.

Technically, it’s sedition. In every way that matters, it’s treason.

I wish I could find something. I’m in IT out in Alberta, and there’s only one market; big oil. If I could leave, I would, but my wife is a teacher and that’s not a career that migrates easily. I’m no fan of the UCP mismanagement and shutting down any opportunity for diversifying our economy, but we just can’t seem to overcome the rural conservative base. It’s like being tied to a rock and watching an avalanche coming straight for you.