The big difference is that cars were a tool that helped regular people by being a force multiplier. Stable Diffusion and DALL-E are not force multipliers in the same way. Sure, you may now produce images that you couldn't before, but there are far fewer profitable uses for images than for cars. Images don't materially affect the world, but cars can.
This isn't super convincing to me. You're basically predicting that some new innovation will be limited in its usefulness, but you have no real way of knowing that, because the variables are too complex.
This is why we have a market. We let billions of individuals vote on what they think is useful or not, in real-time, multiple times a day, every day. If AI-generated images are less desirable than what came before, then people won't use them or pay to use them in the long run. They'll die like other flash-in-the-pan fads have died, artists will retain their jobs en masse, and OpenAI won't gain much if any power.
The entire idea of the market is to ensure that if some entity is gaining money/power, that's happening as a result of it providing some commensurate good to the people. And if that's not happening, or if the power is too great, that's why we have laws and regulatory bodies.
The big difference is that cars were a tool that helped regular people by being a force multiplier. Stable Diffusion and DALL-E are not force multipliers in the same way. Sure, you may now produce images that you couldn't before, but there are far fewer profitable uses for images than for cars. Images don't materially affect the world, but cars can.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33227303
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