The PR flacks for ChatGPT probably deserve a bonus.
They have managed to convince a lot of people that anyone who currently has a desk job will be out of work by the end of the year.
ChatGPT and anything like it dips into the existing corpus of pictures / words / facts / academic papers / novels / poems / political speeches / whatever and produces something to your specifications from that corpus.
In response to "Produce a Theory of Everything that does not look like String Theory or Quantum Gravity" it will fail. Unless it tires pulling a Sokal Hoax on us. Likewise "Prove or refute the Collatz Conjecture" will draw a blank, though an icon of a blowing fuse might be appreciated.
"Paint a picture in a style nobody has seen yet" is logically impossible for it to do, since it has to draw on existing pictures. "Write a novel in the style of no previous writer about a subject nobody has written about before" would be equally impossible. A Real Person could attempt both, even if they failed through lack of checking for uniqueness - the point is that a Real Person could produce a painting or a novel that they had never seen or read before, but for ChatGPT it is a logical impossibility.(*)
Anyway, that isn't the point.
The point is that AI is just another tool. Like all new tools it will split a given community into those who can make it work to their advantage and those who can't get on with it. This was also true about spreadsheets, the metal tennis racquet, oil paint, sous vide and a thousand other new techniques and gadgets. AI in medicine would be a tremendous support tool, especially to older doctors who start to forget things or don't keep up (yes, I know Dreyfus used doctors as examples of Experts who could not be reproduced by AI, but after many years I've come to the conclusion that he wouldn't say those things now. He was writing in a medically-simpler age.)
How much of a difference is there between a writer turning out novels within a genre and an AI turning out a novel within a genre? The genre fans want the genre content, not the writer's unique personality (even if the genre is the writer, as in Chandler or Simenon).
There is probably an audience who would appreciate AI-generated genre novels, and one that won't. Publishers will produce both.
For decades, the British television has been producing TV that looks as if it was written to a set of rules and conventions that feel fake to me.
As for AI-Fake paintings, what else would you call a Thomas Kincaid? Or a Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst or Takashi Murakami? Just because these are Human Beings, doesn't mean to say they aren't using AI techniques, or perhaps, that those are the techniques that can be incorporated into AI.
Which actually helps to make a point I'm exploring in a long essay on the Philosophy of Mathematics, that technique rather than specific content is where originality really lies.
(*) This may be debatable, depending on how one thinks of the difference between "originality" and "variations", and at what point a "variation" becomes a "novelty" becomes "original". Those concepts are related but also have differences.
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