Those are tools humans use to created output directly to speed up a process. The equivalent argument for AI would be if the typewriter wrote you a novel based on what you asked it to write, and then everyone else's typewriter might create the same/similar novel if it's averaging all of the same human data input. This leads to a cultural inbreeding of sorts since the data that went into it was curated to begin with.
The real defining thing to remember is that humans don't need AI, but AI needs human data.
Humans also need human data. You might be better than I, but at least for myself, I know that I am just a weighted pattern matcher with a some stochasticity mixed in.
I don't think the idea of painstakingly writing out a book, and then having a printing press propagate your book so that all can easily reproduce the idea in their own mind, is so very different.
I think this is why the real conversation here is about the lossiness of the data, where the "data" is conveying a fundamental idea. Put another way, human creativity is iterative, and the reason we accept "innovative" ideas is that we have a shared understanding of a body of work, a canon, and the real innovation is taking the canon and mixing it up with one new innovation.
I'm not even arguing that AI is net good or bad for humanity. Just that it really isn't so different than the printing press. And like the Bible was to the printing press, I think the dominant AI model will greatly shape human output for a very long time, as the new "canon" in an otherwise splintered society, for good and for bad.
Proprietary models, with funding and existing reach (like the Catholic Church when the Gutenberg press came along), will dominate the mental space. We already have Martin Luther's nailing creeds to the door of that church, though.
Still, writing by hand does still have special meaning, encoding additional information that is not conveyed by printing press. But then as now, that additional meaning is mostly only accessible to those closest to you, that have more shared experiences with you.
I'll accept that there's an additional distinction, though, since layers of communication will be imported and applied without understanding of their context; ideas replaced, filled in, rather than stripped. But let's be honest: every interpretation of a text was already distinct and uniquely an individual's own, albeit likely similar to those that shared an in-group.
AI upsets the balance between producers and consumers, but not in the way that it's easier for more people to be producers, but in this day in age, that there is so little time left to be a consumer when everyone you know can be such a prolific producer.
Edit: typewriters and printing presses also need human data
> Just that it really isn't so different than the printing press.
The part that makes the goals of the AI crowd an entirely different beast from things like the printing press is that the printing press doesn't think for anyone. It just lets people reproduce their own thoughts more widely.
The printing press lets people reproduce other people's thoughts more widely. As to reproducing your own thoughts more widely, this is why I was describing a cultural "canon" as being the foundation upon which new ideas can be built. In the AI world, the "new" idea is effectively just the prompt (and iterative direction); everything else is a remix of the canon. But pre-AI, in order for anyone to understand your new idea, you had to mix it into the existing canon as well.
Edit: to be abundantly clear, I'm not exactly hoping AI can do very well. It seems like it's going to excel at automating the parts of software development that I legitimately enjoy. I think that's also true for other creator-class jobs that it threatens.
Humans/life don't need data. Life survives off of experience and evolutionary pressures. Data is a watered-down/digitized form of experience meant as a replication of that experience, the same way you can hear/analyze music on your computer. It's just usually close enough that most people can't tell the difference. All of that was fed by human "data", which means AI as ultimately a copy of evolutionary pressures that it never went through.
Typewriter/printing presses are for faster propagation or execution. AI in the cultural sense is about replication, hence the Artificial Intelligence tag. Typewriters aren't attempting to replicate or substitute, they are tools like a hammer. They are designed to be operated by humans since they are analog in nature, like your keyboard. AI doesn't need a keyboard, it's operating off our end contributions directly. It cares about the final, digitized form of the novels we feed it, no how we made it or came up with it.
That is the key difference here. It is the same thing when someone creates something based on their own direct experiences versus someone who is simply copying something. It is why AI art for example is increasingly looking bizarre in my opinion: it's completely recycled/fake.