I saw an "AI" tool recently which showed how you could create two very different poses for a character, and it would "tween" between the two in a realistic, convincing way. It could be described as "genAI" I suppose, but the company claimed they were very specific with how they trained the model and what it was intended to do.

There were still animators upset about it, and I get it. I'd probably be upset about it if I were in that profession. I'm certainly upset about LLM use in programming. But if I squint really hard, I can barely eke out a vision of limited, targeted, vetted tools which accomplish very specific aids to creators in their professional workflows.

That is not by and large how any of the services we regularly hear about are built and marketed. There's a wide gulf between ethically-sourced, limited professional workflow tools and the Copilots & Soras & Sunos of the world. I would say as a general rule, if something is produced based on a "prompt", it should be immediately viewed with immense suspicion.

Those are the surface level issues. The majority of haters will probably be silenced by a perceived de-escalation, but the police state will still grow. The military industrial complex will make their autonomous death machines. The tech feudalists will pool power.

Assuming Nvidia manages to survive the burst and pivots into consumer-grade AI hardware (rather than $50,000 a pop datacenter GPUs), then I suspect a lot of companies and rich hobbyists will buy and use specialized GPUs for art. Meanwhile starving artists won't be able to afford the $1,000+ GPUs, so that will put more bargaining power in the hands of employers and they'll use AI as an excuse to drive their wages down further. Of course artists are already some of the most underpaid jobs out there so I don't think there will be much of a push to replace them completely — just to pay them even less while expecting them to do more than before.

I doubt it will ever be cost-effective to completely remove human artists from the pipeline because I doubt it'll ever be possible to produce AI art that isn't recognizable enough to produce backlash. AI will still be used for cheap shovelware, sure, but serious projects will probably just use it for rapid prototyping and continue to use (underpaid) humans for the final production art while pretending they're work is less valuable than ever.

I suspect it will be a similar story for software engineers, too. Even if it costs an employer 50k every few years to maintain a rack of GPUs in a server closet somewhere, that's still cheaper than paying a mid-level engineer, so they'll cut as many devs as they can and ask the remaining ones to use the AI tools to do more with less. Wages will probably stagnate in this sector as well as a result (for the devs who aren't laid off).