Some stores require you to use the app for order pickup.

Sounds like a store to avoid like the plague.

Pity. I would kind of like to know what the scam website is.

So, before the invention of the camera, the most valuable and most popular creative skill was replicating people on canvas as realistically as possible. Yes, we remember famous exceptions like Picasso, but by sheer number of paintings the most common were portraits of rich people.

After the cameras took that job away, prevailing art changed to become more abstract and “creative”. But that still pissed off a lot of people that had spent a very long time honing a skill that was now no longer in demand.

What we’re seeing is a similar shift. I think future generations of artists will value color theory, composition, etc. over specific brush stroke techniques. AI will make art much more accessible once enough time has passed for AI assisted art to be considered art. Make no mistake: it will always be people that actually create the art - AI will just reduce/remove the grunt work so they can focus more on creativity.

Now, whether billion dollar corporations deserve to exploit the labor of millions of people is a whole separate conversation, but tl;dr: they don’t, but they’re going to anyway because there is little to stop them in correct economic/governance models.

False.

I work for Microsoft and I can assure you that any effort I make to increase code quality or reduce jank (or pretty much anything other than shoving more AI in our products) will not positively impact my bonus next year.

It’s unfortunate, but AI image generators will make exactly what you want, royalty free.

A better comparison would be an iPhone. Apple has locked that down so much that it’s impossible to install something like CrowdStrike falcon, thus it’s not possible for something like this to happen.

Microsoft is saying if the EU would let them, they too could lock down their platform enough to prevent this from happening.

However, I would prefer to maintain control over my device and do what I want with it, instead of just what Apple/Microsoft want; even if that means I might break my device.

You could absolutely install software on Windows 3.5 that would crash the system.