Midjourney/Stable Diffusion/DALLE are doing to Photoshop what it did to traditional drawing methods. But there's still a human in the loop.
A lot of the "humans will still be needed" arguments implicitly rely on the assumption that the trend of AI progress stops here.
The original DALL-E was released just a year ago. In one year, AI image generation went from generating images that looked slightly normal if you squinted really hard, to the beautiful, detailed and creative results we see today.
The same speed of progress can be observed in almost all other domains, from code generation to question answering and music synthesis.
For many of these problems, it almost feels like the next step up in quality is just two hours of planning and a couple months of training away. Like they're already solved and just waiting for someone to implement the solution.
So yeah, humans are still needed right now. But I wouldn't base my hopes for the future on that, because the world of AI capabilities will probably look very different in just one year.
Conversely, even if something IS made deliberately and by a human, I'm not forced to recognize it as intentional. I could likewise argue that the guy making it is just a big blob of molecules following (mostly) deterministic rules, and deny them personhood. It would be a pretty shitty thing to do, but it wouldn't be factually wrong. Or right. As I said, it's a teleological choice to ascribe something the ability to have intentions.
But it would not make much sense to ascribe intentionality to both a computer algorithm and the person using it, seeing as the former is a product of the latter.
However I think he was trying to get this story.
I am spending far too long on OpenAI and I see it as next level creative tool. It is not a gimmick like that deep mind Python app that Google had a few years ago (that turned everything into an uncanny dogs head).
What I like is the confidence this new technology has. I have seen lots of things go digital over the years and always found an artist backlash. Digital photography, even Photoshop itself. You can create the next Mona Lisa with nothing more than lasers and space dust and an artist will snub you and go back to making their little clay pots.
With this new OpenAI the results are compelling and there is no denying it.
You also don't need to know any language apart from English. It is not like you need to do something like know how matrices multiply or do trigonometry (yep, that basic stuff we learn at school and never use in real life).
With any tech that is 'wow' you have to make the tech not part of the product. Imagine you have a new image viewer that can give you infinite zoom. You use it to show a gallery of blueprints from a museum. Although the new zoom tool enables you to show off these blueprints, you need to just make it utterly understated and not advertised as 'wow infinite zoom!'. You have to keep focused on the content, the blueprints and making the tech transparent to the objective.
With OpenAi it is the same deal, we have the gimmick of fooling the experts. But then when used day to day then it is just another tool to tell the story and to craft the art.
Let a monkey write for a million years and choose the best writing. I think that currently AI is better than that, but not so far as to be a misleading comparation.
Also funny how everyone reduces art to painting or even worse digital illustration. Talk about 'AI killing art' once the computers create something superior (not a matter of 'subjectivity') to Amore e Psiche.
Thankfully doesn't apply to people who are familiar with the works of Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Picasso, Klimt, Dali.
At the same time I'm painting the macro picture where most artistic labour is of a commercial nature. Where output is leading as long as it is good enough to serve the purpose: sales, entertainment, decoration, whichever.