I personally find it infuriating that the jobs we're closest to automating right now are the ones that we dreamed of doing as youths.

Who dreamed of cleaning bathrooms or flipping burgers? Too bad, that's still done by manual humans.

But who dreamed of being an artist or a writer? Great, we've figured out how to replace you with a generative algorithm!

Not just dreamed of doing as youths, they are also exactly the jobs that AI positivists promised we would be doing instead when robots took away all the boring "make rent" crap.

They won't. They own the hardware, the distribution channels and the datacenters.

For comparison, despite making professional music is even easier (a copy of Ableton Live Lite and a few hours of studio recording for the vocals makes for less than 300$) every single music chart is still dominated by music made by corporations (Universal Sony / Time Warner, mainly).

On the other hand, music is less valuable than ever. From 20$/unit (the price of a CD) to 0.0004c for stream. Or you get lucky and somehow someone buys your music during bandcamp friday.

Just a subset of Musicians are still around because they're famous enough to get an audience for their tours and/or dj sets. Visual artists have nothing comparable to sustain themselves.

I hope we will see much bigger universes with intricate and detailed lore where human steers parts of storylines and visuals to make them interesting and fit together but AI fills in the blanks.

Gamedev example: If NPCs lines can be generated quickly, maybe it's possible to develop open world games that change their character throughout the game.

Way to often addons and expansions are carefully cordoned off from the main game because no one wants to redo all that work.

Will any of these meaningfully enhance gameplay? Sure, there could be more features, but what is the marginal utility? I think people assume more immersive, more expansive is better for games, but I'm not sure this is the case.

Dungeons & Dragons demonstrated that intelligent open world is so attractive people will crank through it with all the friction of paper character sheets, rule books, encyclopedias of creature stats, dice, dungeon masters prep and problem solving…

I would love to collect a group of human and NPC players and attempt a heist from an actually intelligent dragon in an environment where no action was guardrailed

Encounter creatures and cultures with no documentation but what you learn my interacting with them

And with beautiful scenery to boot

Good point.

I was thinking of enhancing existing capabilities to develop open world games of smaller teams or to buff out a main storyline with "world chatter".

This would act as a multiplier for writers to better use the available budget/time. Sure it may not write a brilliant and engaging story (without human editing) but given the "lore" of a village and it's geographical/political position in the world I can definitely see it being useful to "set the tone" of otherwise generic background NPCs.

PS: Maybe this is me trying to find use cases for current LLMs (with their known capabilities and weaknesses) that don't involve dismissing them out of hand or "the singularity".

And digital art in general. If you can't tell the difference between human made and AI made art, they will cost the same. Near $0.

Creative people are paid to be creative, not enter keyboard shortcuts all day. It’s the idea and vision that are the real differentiator.

Kids at street corners have idea and vision, no shortage in that. What matters is putting together idea and vision with execution. And for anything that is beyond basement scope, execution further subdivides into craft and access. Access to the means, and that is true for Hollywood as much as it is true for the smallest-time painter who might not be good at making friends with gallerists. The outliers are those that learn the craft, network into a position of access and still retain some trace of idea and vision through all of that.

Kids on corners have ideas. Very few of them are GOOD ideas. Anyone can say 'Make a movie with lots of aliens and lasers'. It still takes Ridley Scott to make Alien.

Yet at the same time that "Pinback chased by the beach ball monster" scene that eventually evolved into Alien is hilariously deep in "kids on street corner ideas" territory

Kids at street corners have idea and vision, but may lack TASTE - the ability to discern the good from the bad. If the button-pushers have great AI but lack taste they will still produce a terrible end product.