AI is a threat the same way a gun or a car can be. It depends on who's controlling it, and for what purpose. Good guys have guns, too.
people look at A.I as a sentient being but it just program that is following commands put into it.
Exactly. Garbage in, garbage out.
It's not creative. It can feel that way because you're exiting your fishbowl and letting something else suggest "things", but those things are precompiled, they already existed in a model somewhere. It feels creative because it's not something you thought of, and the response to your "show me gud idea" prompt caused YOUR mind to interpret additional context/connective tissue without you realizing, so it seems like magic.
I've been working with OpenAI's API extensively since it first came out. I've tried other ones like Bard and a few LLMs you run locally, and if you play with them enough it's pretty clear how far they really are from what people are worried about. If your job is banging out 100 line scripts for a living, you're in trouble. If your job is writing shit copy for brochure websites, you're in trouble. But, if your job requires inventiveness and humanity, you'll be fine.
AI has made my job much easier. I can focus on the value I'm creating instead of the mechanical timesucking motions some of that requires. You know how people complain that technology was supposed to make life simpler, but all it did was add more things for you to have to manage? This is the first time I've felt like something new took some of that away. My knowledge, vision and creativity can take the lead, and the "I wish we had an intern" stuff falls by the wayside.
It'll replace jobs, that's for sure. It'll create them though, too. And the ones it does won't be soul-sucking drone jobs, they'll be ones that require humanity. When I was an IT guy back in the day, we used to joke that 80% of tech support was knowing how to ask Google the right question. It's a tool; an amazing one, but this feels the same as when I discovered the internet.
I built an AI trained on John Titor's content, by the way. He's uncanny.