Man, so much to unpack here. It has me worried for a lot of the reasons mentioned: The people who pay money to skilled labor will think "The subscription machine can just do it." And that sucks.

I'm a digital artist as well, and while I think genAi is a neat toy to play with for shitposting or just "seeing what this dumb thing might look like" or generating "people that don't exist" and it's impressive tech, I'm not gonna give it ANY creative leverage over my work. Period. I still take issue with where it came from and how it was trained and the impact it has on our culture and planet.

We're already seeing the results of that slop pile generated from everyone who thought they could "achieve their creative dreams" by prompting a genie-product for it instead of learning an actual skill.

As for actual usefulness? Sometimes I run a local model for funsies and just bounce ideas off of it. It's like a parrot combined with a "programmer's rubber ducky." Sometimes that gets my mind moving, in the same way "autocomplete over and over" might generate interesting thoughts.

I also will say it's pretty decent at summarizing things. I actually find it somewhat helpful when YouTube's little "ai summary" is like "This video is about using this approach taking these steps to achieve whatever."

When the video description itself is just like "Join my Patreon and here's my 50+ affiliate links for blinky lights and microphones" lol

I use it to explain concepts to me in a slightly different way, or to summarize something for which there's a wealth of existing information.

But I really wish people were more educated about how it actually works, and there's just no way I'm trusting the centralized "services" for doing so.