AI and skills

Talking to Tom Graves yesterday I wanted to see what he thought about AI.
He avoided talking about the ethical issues that surround AI ‘repurposing’ art and instead talked about AI and skills. He highlighted a much more insidious issue: our reliance on AI leading to a gradual loss of skills.
Below is a simple diagram showing how people gain skills, in part through innovation and experimentation leading to new products/art/etc. Those people make a living from this process and train the next generation and so on. But much of AI created products/art/etc (not all) are bypassing that process. People are beginning to rely on AI to create products, instead of relying on the skills of trained people. In the short term, this might seem to have advantages. But if these skills gradually disappear no new products/art/etc will be made except from an increasingly stagnant pool of AI generated work, which was based originally on human innovation.
AI used in other ways can have huge benefits, such as sifting through millions of potential new drugs or tracking wildfires.
In short AI should be used (carefully) to enhance our skills, not that we use it to replace our skills.