Empowering to their users. A lot of things that empower their users necessarily disempower others, especially if we define power in a way that is zero-sum - the printing press disempowered monasteries and monks that spent a lifetime perfecting their book-copying craft (and copied books that no doubt were used in the training of would-be printing press operators in the process, too).
It seems to me that the standard use of "empowering" implies in particular that you get more power for less effort - which in many cases tends to be democratizing, as hard-earned power tends to be accrued by a handful of people who dedicate most of their lives to pursuit of power in one form or another. With public schooling and printing, a lot of average people were empowered at the expense of nobles and clerics, who put in a lifetime of effort for the power literacy conveys in a world without widespread literacy. With AI, likewise, average people will be empowered at the expense of those who dedicated their life to learn to (draw, write good copy, program) - this looks bad because we hold those people in high esteem in a world where their talents are rare, but consider that following that appearance is analogously fallacious to loathing democratization of writing because of how noble the nobles and monks looked relative to the illiterate masses.
I get why you might describe these tools as ‘democratising’, but it also seems rather strange when you consider that the future of creativity is now going to be dependent on huge datasets and amounts of computation only billion-dollar companies can afford. Isn’t that anything but democratic? Sure, you can ignore the zeitgeist and carry on with traditional dumb tools if you like, but you’ll be utterly left behind.
Datasets can still be curated by crowds of volunteers just fine. I would likewise expect a crowdsourceable solution to compute to emerge eventually - unless the safetyists move to prevent this by way of legislation.
When writing and printing emerged, they too depended on supply chains (for paper, iron, machining) and in the case of printing capital that were far out of the reach of the individual. Their utility and overlap with other mass markets resulted in those being commoditized in short order.
It seems to me that the standard use of "empowering" implies in particular that you get more power for less effort - which in many cases tends to be democratizing, as hard-earned power tends to be accrued by a handful of people who dedicate most of their lives to pursuit of power in one form or another. With public schooling and printing, a lot of average people were empowered at the expense of nobles and clerics, who put in a lifetime of effort for the power literacy conveys in a world without widespread literacy. With AI, likewise, average people will be empowered at the expense of those who dedicated their life to learn to (draw, write good copy, program) - this looks bad because we hold those people in high esteem in a world where their talents are rare, but consider that following that appearance is analogously fallacious to loathing democratization of writing because of how noble the nobles and monks looked relative to the illiterate masses.