These artists all realize that there is nothing special about their work, no "divine spark", no special sauce that makes it distinct. That's why they freak out. If AI art was always clearly AI art and inferior, there would be nothing to worry about and nobody would talk about it, and that is the core of the matter - everything else being equal, on observation alone (and please read this sentence carefully) there is simply no difference between a given piece of human made art and a lucky draw by the AI. Don't take my word for it, just listen to the artists. They seem to think so, otherwise why would they freak out? As this technology will get better, you'll see more of this in the future in other fields. I think it hits artists especially hard since many of them go through their life being told that they have a gift, that they are special. Being shown by a computer program of all things that in the grand scheme of things, their "gift" can be statistically approximated like everything else probably is a particularily bitter pill to swallow for them.
There was a new model released to the general public on friday (FLUX by black forest labs) that comes pretty damn close to Dall-E 3 but has open weights, meaning everyone can run it. Not everyone will because it has rather high requirements, but it for example doesn't really always
fuck up hands anymore. (you can scroll that thread for more examples, it was also stated that it will get all the fancy tools like control net, so more professional work will be possible with it) I want to remind people here that stable diffusion, especially the early versions, were first and foremost made to be efficient models that can run on average hardware, not the best models possible.
Saying AI tech has "peaked" is such a weird statement to make at this point in time, especially considering that new developments outpace old ones on approximately a three month scale right now. What is currently going on in this space feels like Moore's law on steroids. I went through that time of computer evolution in the 80s and 90s and it really feels exactly the same. I can only imagine such statements come from ignorance of the developments, an incredibly short attention span or wishful thinking. Computers also got a lot of hate before everyone owned one so even that aspect of this entire thing is not really original.
Also even if LLMs wouldn't change from today on (and they will), their accessibility and existence has already changed the world forever. Never before could a computer read/hear/see/process/create/understand/explain the world around it and human language in a natural way and this has been one of the biggest goals of of computer science since the first conception of what we understand as modern computing. Just because you cannot think of an application, don't assume nobody can. Granted, they might not be as efficent and useful as we need them to be for some tasks, but so weren't the early computers. They still eventually changed the world forever.
