You needed to have tools, skill, resources and time to do such things. You don't need to have that anymore. Anyone can do anything on any scale.
It's something what SpaceX did. Ofc it was possible to launch a rocket before SpaceX, but few really could afford that. Now that prices are low, that opens infinite number of new space exploration possibilities.
In practice, "infinite" translates mainly to a handful of hyper-competitive guys checking off "went to space" off their achievements list. There is a very good reason for that: space is very inhospitable, much more inhospitable than Antarctica. Nothing much has happened in Antarctica for 100 years beyond the occasional hyper-competitive athlete and a few research stations. Perhaps a natural resource gold rush might liven up the place for a few decades, until exhaustion and falling back to inhospitable status, dotted with the rare ghost town remains.
Something similar happens in the "creative" space: the Internet unleashed a massive tidal wave of "content", yet the vast vast majority of it is rather trite and devoid of any (spiritual) meaning. Personally, I'm much more inclined to stick with the classics than even 20 years ago, simply because it's not worth my time wading through the deluge of poor quality "content" out there. To wrap up the analogy, I'd rather inhabit a nutritionally rich environment, than getting lost in the the vast, but mostly empty, expanse of the Internet.
I would take today's internet-fuelled media landscape over the landscape of 20 years ago in a heart beat.
The question I often ask myself: is spending time with this content, while entertaining in the short term, perhaps via the novelty factor, also nourishing in the long term? The answer is, sadly, much more frequently NO than in the time of printed books.
The best I can hope is to be able to use Internet as an encyclopedia for laser-focused lookups. Sadly, I am too often caught in browsing random content only loosely related to the original lookup topic.
A lot of the “trite” internet creations have gone on to become absolutely massive songs or artists.
Downloading a cracked copy of Photoshop and checking out a book from the library on how to edit photos is only somewhat more difficult than learning to use Python and write programs that generate art from some model. And only because learning anything is extremely easy today with so many free resources and help forums.
> Anyone can do anything on any scale.
I'll believe it when I see it.
> Now that prices are low, that opens infinite number of new space exploration possibilities.
Except SpaceX is still in the "crawl" phase of "crawl, walk, run", and they only got even that far because because an eccentric billionaire has staked his reputation on the problem and thrown a huge amount of money at it, without having to worry about things like "reporting to Congress" and "making sure the space program creates jobs in such-and-such voting district". And after all that effort and truly astounding engineering (the rocket lands itself back on the launch pad!!), space launches are still expensive, risky, and complicated, and will remain so into the foreseeable future (~decades).
That's what Bezos did with its Blue Origin. If you check where is Blue Origin in space race, you'll quickly realize it's not enough
Edit: ah, and is space still expensive? If one of universities in my middle-sized country with no space engineering background could afford to launch cubesat via SpaceX, then yes, I think it became cheap.
Most people using those models aren't writing Python code. Check out https://www.reddit.com/r/dalle2/, https://www.reddit.com/r/midjourney/, https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/, https://www.reddit.com/r/bigsleep/ etc
I expect that once the technology matures, a smaller and smaller niche of users will be doing any kind of programming
How much practice would one need after doing that, before they're able to match the quality of some of the AI generated art? Not all of the AI generated artwork is perfect, but some of the art would take the average person years of practice to be able to match. Some art requires more than a cracked copy of Photoshop and a weekend of reading a book you borrowed from a library. You may be surprised to find that some people spend years honing their craft.
I have yet to see an example of "Synthetic AI media" that was both realistic and not immediately recognizable as being synthetically generated.
And if you think being 99% there means we're very close to 100% just remember how long it's taken self driving cars to close the gap (we actually don't know how long since they still haven't succeeded in this).
Would you know if you had?
Man, am I a good photographer or what
I mean, probably if you're familiar enough with squirrels something gives it away, but I'm not.
https://imgur.com/mcJsg0n and https://imgur.com/41eENUO
It also took a number of much worse images to get those ones.
In case anyone is worried, it isn't remotely erotic or otherwise nsfw.
I'm not particularly familiar with squirrels and something about that "photo" looks very off. If you showed it to me in a vacuum I'd just assume someone was trying to make a highly stylized version of something they had a photo reference for, but under no circumstances would I believe that's a real photo.
Three months ago I'd probably have agreed with you. Things have changed.