Your argument is used time and time again with technology’s progress.
I love tech, but if you take the stance that it's okay to hurt people for the sake of technical progress, you get into some very dark and terrible places...
Hurt is a very subjective word in this context, how many people do you think the invention of the steam engine hurt? Or the electricity?
The upside is that creative works are completely democratized.
Now, anyone, with very little effort is fully empowered to create creative works on their own and there is no barrier to entry.
Yes, empowerment and democratization harms people who's livelyhood depends on disenfranchisement.
That's a strawman. The real view is that protecting jobs that are made extinct by technology and automation is historically a bad idea because it leads to stagnation and poverty. It's better to let people lose their jobs, and for those people to find other jobs, while supporting them with a social safety net while they make the transition. Painful for them but unfortunately very necessary for a prosperous society.
This is the part that no one is expecting to see actually happen, though. Without that addressed, your argument is sound but footless.
What no one is asking is: 'it this makes it easy for anyone to be an artist, a director, a musician... what are we going to get, and will it be worse than what we have now?
Everyone is asking this.
But that's also not the only question. The one you're ignoring here is: If these tools enable one artist to do the work of a hundred, what happens to the other 99?
AI boosters have as yet offered no satisfactory answer for this question. Given the intimate involvement some of them have with politics at the national and global level, this absence constitutes reasonable grounds for suspicion that no answer is intended or forthcoming, and that suspicion is what's asking here to be addressed.
Not really -- as people have gotten more efficient at their jobs, we tend to just produce more/better things, not impoverish a bunch of people. If one person can day (8 hours) making a shoe by hand, and one person can make a shoe in an hour using a shoe making machine, then we don't have one less shoe maker, we have two people making 16 shoes a day. As an effect, shoes are now much cheaper, so they aren't only worn by rich people. If the one-shoe-per-day maker refuses to use a shoe making machine, he or she can upsell their 'hand crafted' shoes to rich people who want to distinguish themselves.
Believe me, I am not a 'free market fixes everything' person, at all, but in these cases, that is how it has worked since the industrial revolution. This is not a new process (automation making a task much more accessible/efficient) and this is not a new complaint (what happens to the people who made a living doing task).
Change is scary -- and everyone has the right to be afraid of an uncertain future, but I can't recall an instance of the regressive approach actually working to allay the fears of those who imposed it. Yet, we all see huge reminders of how our lives have been improved by making hard things easier and accessible to more people.
It would not surprise me if anyone called this pollyannaish, or even Panglossian.
Did anyone get harmed when photography was used to supplant portraits? Did anyone get harmed when mail started getting sent by rail instead of horse? Did anyone get harmed when air travel became possible? Did anyone get harmed when we supplied electric power to homes?
I have an idea -- why don't you propose a solution to AI ruining creative jobs and we can apply that standard to it.
Of course you may respond that this is unrealistic, which it is; it requires a government capable of acting via regulation in defense of its citizens, and so nothing like it will be done.
Maybe mass unemployment will create a sea change in that mentality, but most of the people who's opinions need to be changed will probably just laugh at "the elites" getting screwed over.
The current batch of LLMs is in the same class of technological revolutions as Napster and The Pirate Bay. Immensely impactful, sure, but mostly because of theft of value from elsewhere.
The factories that replaced the artisans were only made possible by the work of the artisans forging the way.
The question here is really about whether it's sufficiently transformative, or whether that's even the right standard to be applied to generated media.
AI is nothing like anything we’ve seen, and is truly unique in the dangers it poses to the world.