They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

I’m not exactly a visual artist who stands to lose something in this armsrace, but that’s how I tend to look at it. As a software engineer I’m fascinated by the possibilities. There were people who despised the camera when it came to be. I firmly believe that once the AI hype dies down “real” human-made art will not have suffered any setback. At the end of the day this is still people building tools to imitate something worth imitating. Nothing is ever fully original.

If someone can’t see the value in art that took actual human effort to make then that is on them. If a tool is built upon millions of existing pieces of human artistic effort to make it available to the general public I’d see this as less deplorable than copying a CD to a cassette tape in the 80s. If someone tried to make money by selling what is essentially other people’s work then that is obviously a different story, no matter what is being misappropriated.

So the career intelligence muscle who is in office since 1999 can’t possibly be a dictator but the comedian who only became a politician 6 years ago has already managed to dismantle a democracy while spending 3 of those 6 years commanding a wartime army against a goliath of an enemy. The things you learn on the internet.