It's a rhetorical example. Suppose you need to create an avatar of your character. Why does it follow that it's not beneficial to have an AI help generate the avatar?
You're responding to the specific example, not the general argument. Unless your counter is that whatever humanity is doing that AI is helping is probably stupid and shouldn't be done anyway.
> No, my counter is that whatever generative AI is doing is worth doing by humans but not worth doing by machines.
There is no basis to this claim, why is one worth doing by a biological machine but not a silicon one? People cling too highly to biological exceptionalism not understanding that one arose due to certain processes in the world and universe where somewhere else we might have been silicon beings all along. That is to say, people have huge amounts of cognitive dissonance thinking that they are actually simply machines of a biological variety.
> As the joke comic says: We thought technology was going to automate running errands so that we had time to make art, but instead it automates making art while we all have to be gig workers running errands.
Hardware is harder than software. Soon gig workers will be automated by AI too. I have heard this refrain a thousand times but it never ceases to make me think that it's in a specific time and place of the early 21 century. In the 22nd century, given such progress, we might talk of these discussions the same way artists and weavers did in (and of) the early 20th.
> No one needs an avatar. You can draw a stick figure or take a selfie or whatever. This is all so silly and trivial.
This does not answer the question, this sidesteps the requirements. I can either have no avatar, or I can make one for the marginal cost of zero via an AI. This then belies that the true complaint of people against AI is one of an economic variety, not a technological one, in which case, fix the economics, and support open source AI so that all may have such tech, not just big tech.
OK? What does that have to do with pop culture IP rights?
If you're building an LLM for management or technical consulting then the valuable content is locked up behind corporate firewalls anyway so you're going to have to pay to use it. In that field most of what you could find with a web crawler or in digital books is already outdated and effectively worthless.
> Unless your counter is that whatever humanity is doing that AI is helping is probably stupid and shouldn't be done anyway.
No, my counter is that whatever generative AI is doing is worth doing by humans but not worth doing by machines.
As the joke comic says: We thought technology was going to automate running errands so that we had time to make art, but instead it automates making art while we all have to be gig workers running errands.