I’m not optimistic that their impact will be positive though.
Not lifetime. Right now. Just one week of StableDiffusion in the wild has seen the development of many clients, GUIs, optimizations, plugins for commercial software, editing workflows, the list is endless.
The speed of it all is dazzling. It will not take long before this is assembled into a smooth experience that runs everywhere, with obvious end state being your phone.
And that's still just artistic image generation. The open sourcing of it means people can make any vertical, precisely optimized for a particular (commercial) domain.
Almost all shortcomings seem to be crushed in no time. Bad at drawing eyes? Here's a new encoder that fixes it.
The creator of StableDiffusion indicated to soon tackle music generation and if I remember correctly, even poetry. And there's 3D and video.
The ultimate end state: if you can imagine it, it can generate it. Not only are we much closer to that point than society realizes, we're also moving at an exponential speed towards it.
With the risk of looking silly, I declare "meh" once more, just as I "meh"-eh when GPT-3 came out.
The so-called "AI" is not fundamentally different from the AI of the 80s, it's just that now we have much better hardware. The main problem of the past AI winters still remains - the existing algorithms focus on statistical methods, which can be rather inexact. Imagine a nuclear plant controlled by an AI, or an airplane flown by a neural network. They completely lack reasoning capability and therefore you can't trust they will be able to adapt to unpredictable situations.
Either way, I think the current "AI" is fundamentally limited by the statistical approach to problem solving. Without any reasoning capabilities, no amount of incremental improvements will change the fact that neural networks are simply making guesses based on existing data sets. Nothing magical or revolutionary, it's the same thing we've known for many decades.
BUT it will likely be disrupting the upper middle class more than the lower middle classes, as it's mostly disrupting to creative work. Upper middle class people have a louder voice.