Totally agree that what AI is doing right now feels more like the GarageBand/iMovie moment than the iPhone moment. It's democratizing creativity, not necessarily creating billion-dollar companies. And honestly, that's still a big deal
If you're just generating images using AI, you only get 80% there. You need at least to be able to touch up those images to get something outstanding.
Plus, is getting 1 billion bytes of randomness/entropy from your 1 thousand bytes of text input really <your> work?
In person they are compelling, and there is more skill at play than at first glance. I like them at least
I would argue that most art around us is current pop art or classical/realist/romantic art, not modern/postmodern/abstract expressionist art.
I think what AI has made and will make many more people realise is that everything is a derivative work. You still had to prompt the AI with your idea, to get it to assemble the result from the countless others' works it was trained on (and perhaps in the future, "your" work will then be used by others, via the AI, to create "their" work.)
Also, "democratizing"? Please. We're just entrenching more power into the small handful of companies who have been able to raise and set fire to unfathomable amounts of capital. Many of these tools may be free or cheap to use today, but there is nothing for the commons here.