Of course, one reason I might mind is if the machine uses what it learns from reading my work to produce work that could substitute for my own. But at the risk of hubris, I don’t think that’s likely in the foreseeable future. For me, a human creator’s very humanity feels like the ultimate trump card over the machines: Who cares about a computer’s opinion on anything?

This is really naïve. A huge number of people simply don’t care about creative works in those terms. We’re all encouraged to treat things as content to be consumed and discarded, not something to be actually thought about in terms of what it was expressing and why. The only value of a creator in that framework is that the creator fuels the machine and AI can fuel the machine. Not especially well at the moment but give it some time.

I like the comparisons with synthesizers, digital cameras, Photoshop etc. Not an aspect I’d considered before, so it will be interesting if we do in fact see a “creativity boom” as a result of these new techs…

Personally, I’ve found the text based LLMs to be invaluable in parts of my professional life - for example, churning out boilerplate type text for procedural documents. It’s a tool to be used when appropriate, but currently it’s new and shiny…