An AI tool is not going to produce higher quality work than a professional human.

Yes it will, because there will cease to be professional humans. If there’s no development pipeline, no one is going to achieve the pinnacle of art, because there’s no return on that investment. The AI will become better than any human, not by raising the standard by by kneecapping our ability to reach higher.

It’s ironic you chose to compare it to computers because we’ve seen that the generational decline in mathematical ability has fallen off a cliff as people now don’t even have to think about how numbers work. We have college graduates with zero reading comprehension or writing ability because they’ve never had to independently develop those skills. We have vanishing competency in critical analysis and the ability to carry a dialogue at levels that were considered natural and intrinsic a handful of generations ago. Everywhere we see the constant erosion of the capability of achieving objectives that are less than a generation removed from us. We’re not talking about forgetting how to knap flint or the decline of the buggy whip maker. We’re talking about the intrinsic capacity of the human mind to engage with the world suddenly becoming an investment on which there is no chance of return in a single human lifetime, because there is no economically sustainable path from raw novice to professional.

AI will absolutely surpass us, not by raising the bar, but lowering it into hell under a firehose of garbage.

Or, better idea, stop using AI for creative work people find genuine personal fulfillment in, and eliminating any pathway to excellence. If you can’t afford to pay real people to create genuinely human artistic works, you’re a terrible business person and deserve to fail. It doesn’t make you a “Genius Creative” finding shortcuts to success, it makes you a pathetic hack with no independent talent, a parasite, and a miserly cheapskate on top of that.