Anyone who thinks this is like blockchain should spend 10 hours coding with GPT-4, and then extrapolate those capabilities out a few years. It’s already adding a huge amount of value and productivity gain for me, though you need to know what to use it for.
* in/out painting with photo editing software
* GitHub Copilot
* voice synthesis
* ChatGPT (not great for what a lot of people try to use it for, but I find it useful for brainstorming or as a conversational programming Copilot)
As a good non native German speaker, the ability to send a piece of text to a good LLM for review and correction is incredible. I do not need my wife to review the text I send to the tax authorities, the LLM is doing it for me (and I am good enough to critically assess the quality of the of the LLM work).
This also doesn't at all require ChatGPT to be the first step on a road to self-aware sentient AI or anything else like that - the tools being built today will already disrupt a lot of things enough to allow for new winners and losers.
You get "90%" of the value of the world's best library - access to information - but lose things like a well-organized professional scheme, expert humans to assist you with your queries, and the ability to fill up a table with a bunch of books and reference materials side by side vs what you can fit onto your screen at once.
But you also add some new things - you don't have to travel, multiple people can use it at once, etc - that all basically could be thrown into the "10% the cost" bucket: a company doesn't have to spend to send researchers around, they don't have to wait, etc.
And publishers and artists of course were convinced that the internet would be the death of their current business models, that they were just extractive tools, not creative, and bad for their world; and weren't exactly wrong.
They're both just moving bits around and summarizing more than doing the original research to figure out atomic theory, say. But "10% the cost" - and especially "10% the time required" unlocks A LOT of ability to do more, fancier things. As does bypassing gatekeeping requirements (pay to travel, pay to have marketing copy written, pay/have connections to get access to the right archives, "sponsor" an artist to create stuff personally for you...).
I think ChatGPT is generally bad as a creative agent (vs a carefully used tool) and is gonna result in the internet being full of even more low-value BS than before, but I think it's inaccurate to say that it's not going to unlock anything new. It's just gonna look way different than today's internet.
Is a world with Patreon more or less gate-kept from the perspective of "influencing things to your taste" than one where you had to be rich enough to sponsor a Mozart or such?
Is a world where you can't afford to make your own compositions because you don't have the money to afford the tutelage or the free time to master every single step more or less gate-kept than one where you can play around and learn on free or cheap software tools?
It'll be different but there will still be artists - creation will be open to more people than ever before - and I also don't expect that the power-law function of cultural products and taste will change, so there will still be big winners from those artists able to command $$$.
Overall I believe that this is certainly a disruptive, possibly revolutionary, information systems technology but I don't believe it's more uniquely purely extractive than something like the internet or previous disruptive ones.