Comparing image generation to earlier technological breakthroughs has been very helpful for me in two ways. Photography is my go-to comparison.
First, it helps quell the extreme ends of anti-AI paranoid fear I sometimes feel, to think that yes, it could change the world significantly and make some things disappear or reduce to irrelevance (e.g. realist art) and make new things appear and rise to relevance (e.g. mass media), yet throughout all this the more fundamental aspects of humanity and human society and culture have endured and adapted just fine.
Second, it gives me more empathy for those people who were/are afraid of or simply opposed to other technological developments which I take for granted (again photography, TV, the internet, trains, nuclear power..), which various fears/oppositions are often an object of derision and ridicule.
I feel this (AI, starting roughly at ~alphago) is the first significant breakthrough that I'm consciously living through myself, and this does a lot to one's worldview I think.
First, it helps quell the extreme ends of anti-AI paranoid fear I sometimes feel, to think that yes, it could change the world significantly and make some things disappear or reduce to irrelevance (e.g. realist art) and make new things appear and rise to relevance (e.g. mass media), yet throughout all this the more fundamental aspects of humanity and human society and culture have endured and adapted just fine.
Second, it gives me more empathy for those people who were/are afraid of or simply opposed to other technological developments which I take for granted (again photography, TV, the internet, trains, nuclear power..), which various fears/oppositions are often an object of derision and ridicule.
I feel this (AI, starting roughly at ~alphago) is the first significant breakthrough that I'm consciously living through myself, and this does a lot to one's worldview I think.