Today's humans should train for applications where they have a lasting advantage over machines: physical-object-manipulation tasks of low power and low-to-moderate repetitiveness, where the humans' cheap and nimble actuators outperform machinery on a cost basis.

That brings an interesting question, what is the fully-loaded cost of these nimble actuators. It's not like they appear from the womb ready to be a worker

AI has generally been shown to have high creativity (e.g. Dall-E). However, AI is still lagging in other functional areas where humans excel (e.g. driving).

So, the conclusion might be the actual opposite that AI will first achieve human level creativity before (if ever) acquiring human functional skills.

Creativity requires solving unexplored problems. Painting a picture isn't creative, nor is it particularly marketable.

Figuring out a way to use your love of panting in order to provide a marketable product or service requires creativity, but I'm not sure Dall-E succeeds on that front. What marketable service it is able to provide has been left to the creativity of the humans who operate OpenAI.

"shut up you luddite, it's perfectly acceptable for your artist job to be automated away, progress is inevitable and all of your objections about how this is playing fast and loose with copyright are meaningless" is pretty much what I get from a lot of Hacker News when I talk about how AI art is not making me happy for the future prospects of my field.

I think these artists should be able to prohibit their work being used in a training set

Somewhat related - how does copyright work on the output of these AIs? Can a piece of code be the copyright owner of a picture?

> how does copyright work on the output of these AIs?

the person who pressed the button to start the AI generation for that particular output _should_ own the copyright to it (and also be liable for the infringement if it does).

I'm really curious how this shakes out in the courts. Wouldn't be surprised to see SCOTUS rule on this in the next decade or two.

> Can a piece of code be the copyright owner of a picture?

No. Copyright requires a human creator.