At the moment the AI is using computing resources not owned by the prompt givers. I think land is a good comparison. If you own land you can get money just by renting it to someone else, receiving profit but doing practically no labour whatsoever. Or using cattle to plow a field, doing minimal labour and letting the AI/cattle do most of the work.

So the AI cold be like land or cattle. Or even like a human artist in some ways...

If we think of the AI as a person, because it does what a human artist could if given a prompt, then it's like someone giving a human artist a prompt. The artist does the work based on that prompt, but unless the prompter pays the artist in order to obtain ownership of the work, the artist owns the work. AI can't own things, so I think the owner of the AI should own any work produced using their AI, unless they choose to give away that ownership to the prompt givers for some reason.

If someone's using an open source AI on their own computer to generate art via prompts, or even by letting the AI come up with its own artwork without prompts, then its more like bitcoin mining on your own PC. If you get lucky enough the AI will spit out something you can sell, as long as currency still makes sense. You'll at least be able to get fake internet points (upvotes) for it.

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> Nobody will know anything and the haze of meaningless decadence will descend upon humanity permanently

I, for one, welcome this haze of meaningless decadence. If only because it's better than meaningless scarcity.

We will no longer be able to trust our eyes or ears due to deepfake technology.

I read a scifi book years ago and in it they had the social currency 'Whuffie'https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Down_and_Out_in_the_Magic_Kingdom

All basic needs were met and there wasn't scarcity, but if you wanted a human bartender to pour you a drink that cost wuffie (and the bartenders were rich in terms of wuffie for that reason). Or if you wanted to go on the rides at an amusement park owned by someone else etc. You could also lose wuffie by being an asshole, it being a social currency after all. e.g. bumping into someone and not saying sorry to their satisfaction.

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I think things are going to get weird. It's going to be possible to feel 10/10 happy every second of the day through direct artificial stimulation, but that might come with the downside of everything else in life becoming meaningless. If that tech becomes available I'm not touching it, and I recommend others to do the same. Unless happiness is tied to some meaningful activity, or maintaining good human bonds with friends and family, we're gong to end up with 'pleasure zombies'/wireheading. They'd just exist to experience pleasure, and they don't need to do anything in order to have that happen. There's nothing they're motivated to do, unless it comes from some desire not based on emotion or pleasure.

Unless you can force someone to go without that 10/10 stimulation, you've lost them. Would a family member bother to talk with you if they were in that state for long enough? Talking to you gives them no reward emotionally that they couldn't have at any time without effort.

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"Anything that can go wrong will go wrong"

Someone is going to have access to a powerful AI that has no limits on what it will help the human do, in combination with an atomic fidelity 3D printer. (This could be a writing prompt for a scifi horror story.)

I think things will be amazing and awesome in many ways, and also terrible in others. I know I can't predict accurately how it'll play out.

'Full dive VR' is potentially going to be available, with one of those virtual realities being the situation we're in right now. You start in the year 2022, and find yourself in the middle of talking with someone on the singularity subreddit just like this. Highly popular with those born after the singularity, who didn't get to experience what life was like before it.

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After all this happens, we might look back at people profiting from feeing AI prompts and shrug. It won't matter any more.