One reason I’m more pessimistic about AI than many power users is most power users treat them mainly as a coding agent.
I use AIs to read my technical notes, analyze arguments, extrapolate new directions, and construct summaries.
I give them technical material, ask questions, and make them walk through their reasoning line by line, much the way I was quizzed as a PhD student.
You can tell when they don't fully understand things.
After hundreds, maybe thousands, of hours doing this, you start to notice how weird and incomplete their understanding of reality is.
If you write, paint, compose, or just do any art, you will realize that its value does not lie in it merely being consumable. Hence, being concerned about AI's intrusion into the arts is not a sensible position unless one reduces art to being purely consumable.