All advances in creative tooling are automating creativity. What are you on about? Look at photoshop color selector automates mixing paint, digital filters for audio automate analog mixers. This attitude towards AI creative tools is gatekeeping.
Do you have any doubt that many working artists' copyrighted work was included in the the training data that produced these systems, without those artists licensing their work for that purpose?
It's not gatekeeping to insist that a project obtain a voluntary license from the people who contribute their work to a project.
And it's not gatekeeping to point out the fact that these platforms have only been successful by using working artists' copyrighted work in violation of their rights, without asking permission or providing compensation.
When somebody brings up the invention of photoshop, they're not trying to disprove a point about paying salaries to the devs, and I am sure you knew that.
Rather, the problem is that these systems only exists today because of the involuntary contributions of the very same people who are likely to be put out of business.
It really is about the how the contributors to these systems are being treated. The coders that contributed to Photoshop are analogous to the artists whose work was used to train these models. The difference between them is that the former gave their consent to the contribution, and the latter did not.
That's it, that's the entire post. Never mind the "stolen artwork" argument, you still have people upset about "automating creativity".
So, like I said, it's one part of it.
When the artists whose work was stolen to train these models are compensated for that work then maybe its a "tiny part". Until then it is taking peoples work and using it to create an ultimate competitor in their own market that they cannot compete with. They now have to compete against themselves and they haven't even been paid for that "privilege".
Saying that I agree with you in that I see this technology as a tool that can be used by humans to make amazing things. No one really has yet as the outputs have just been blunted, sloppy things. But if I’m an artist I see these tools as the latest tool to help make things.
There is a difference between saying something is less than and calling it gross. Also, imho, value of art is usually the art not the process. Sometimes it is the process, like someone showing off a new method but that is of interest to very, very few people. Just like academic papers' methodology section. Even within the larger community, it's useful to only a few people. (Apart from just checking someone's work)
Good human photographers are still a thing. They can even get a job out of it! There are books about photos by photographers of renown.
AI automation here would be more like AI deciding which photos to take, and taking them for you, with your interaction limited to "take some nice photos of my vacation". Then some other AI could give likes to the photo, closing the loop so that humans need not be involved at all in that silliness of photography!