I do think that AI tools make creativity better and not worse. I grew up with Youtube poops, photoshop, garry's mod, and flash. Being able to go from idea to asset in a fast, throwaway capacity lets you nuance and remix jokes and media on a level that isn't possible with traditional creative software. I got into software because I wanted to make things that I wanted. I think it is a great thing that the ability to make software is now in the hands of more people than ever, just as 3D printing did for widgets, as cheap chinese manufacturing did for electronics, diffusion models are doing for media.

Media production is often laborious and unfun. I learned that the hard way the first time I whipped out the physgun in Garry's Mod and started trying to make something funny. That experience was absolutely buns and the consequence is I didn't get to make as many fun things to share and enjoy as I could have.

My suspicion is that the people leading the outrage from a creative perspective is people who were, by-and-large, struggling/failing to make it in a creative industry before AI, and this is the outlet for that pent up frustration.

The closest I've come to sympathising has been witnessing the death of the farmer's market under a sea of generic AI slop and Temu garbage. And while sad, that feels like more of a story about globalising supply chains than one about the death of creativity.

The pessimism of Blueskyism feels very alien to me.