I lost everything that made me love my job through Midjourney

This is a nice way of putting it. It just shows how people have a tendency to deny a reality that may replace everything they stand for.

What you will see as AI continues to get better along the obvious trendline is these "denial" arguments become more and more specific. First the AI will "never" replace jobs, then it will "never" replace specific jobs involving "programming skills" or "skills related to what I do" until eventually when the reality of it all is too all encompassing the arguments will evolve into attacks at AI for being "low quality" or something along those lines.

But if AI progresses to the point where the quality of the output becomes undeniably superior to human output the "denial" arguments will inevitably shift to the REAL argument. The heart of it all. What is the purpose of being alive if AI is doing everything? Should we ban it for the sake of the economy for purpose?

These arguments of course only occur based off the assumption that the technology will progress so quickly that the repercussions will be hitting everyone like a freight train. If the progression slows down enough then there won't be much opposition. Only acceptance as it slowly assimilates into our society without people noticing the change.

If you in your heart are one of these people who has no worry about AI taking over jobs because AI is simply too "stupid" perhaps consider the fact that my description above fits you. Are your arguments evolving along a similar trendline? If so, consider shifting your perspective a bit.

The way a good lawyer is gonna make a shitload of money is by asking one simple question: who's the artist?

Say you generate a picture with Midjourney, who's the artist? Not you, definitely not the AI as it's not a person, so the closest artists you can find is the ones who made the pictures in the training set. Done.

Hang tight buddy.

There’s a line of thought that art is specifically meaningful because it’s humans thinking about things, but let’s leave that aside for now.

Generative models are revealing how many jobs in e.g. entertainment are essentially mechanical, from management’s POV. So far, they’ve just happened to require an artist’s education to do well. Now, the craft part is going out the window, and artistic creativity, if it was ever required, is being pushed out of production roles.

This is going to change the type of person who works in entertainment. I expect, while by technical metrics we will probably see quality stay the same or even improve while output increases, we’re also going to see a kind of McDonaldsification of entertainment, even more than we already see, because we’re pushing creative people out of the industry.

TL;DR: Process matters. Art is notoriously difficult to manage and predict what will or will not be successful , in large part because it’s a classic greater-than-the-sum-of-its-parts thing. Devalue the process, devalue the end product.