For me at least, Stable Diffusion has been this great tool for personal expression in a medium that was previously inaccessible to me: images. Now I could communicate with people in this new, accessible way! I've learned more about art history and techniques in the last 3 months than in my entire life up to that point.
So I came up with a few ideas about making some paintings for my mother, and children's books for my nieces and nephew. The anger I received from my artistically inclined colleagues over this saddened me greatly, so I tried to talk to more people to see if this was an anomaly. There was more anger, and argument for censorship! I have to admit I struggled to maintain any empathy after receiving that reception.
I'm personally really excited about a future where we don't have to suffer to create art, whether it's code, an image, or music. Isn't more art and less suffering in our lives a good thing? If there are economic structures we've set up that make that a bad thing, maybe it would be fruitful take a critical look at those.
Presently I'm looking at creating a few small B2B products out of various fine-tuned public AI models. The first thing I realized is that I'd be addressing niches that were just not possible to tackle before (cost, scale, latency). The second thing I noticed is I'd need to hire designers, copywriters, etc. for their judgement -- at least as quality control. So at least in my limited scope of activity, the use of AI permits me to hire creative professionals, to tackle jobs that previously employed zero creative professionals (because previously they weren't done at all, or just done very poorly, e.g. English website copy for small business in non-English-speaking developing economies).
I do feel for people that have decided that they need to retool because they feel AI threatens their job. I do that every couple of years when some new thing threatens an old thing that I do, it's a chunk of work, and not always fun. To show better empathy, I think I'm going to reach out to more artists and show them what the current AI tools can and cannot do, to help them along this path. So thank you for your post, because it gave me the idea to take this approach!
...and on the weekends, I can still write code in hand-optimized assembly, because that's the brush I love painting with.