I feel like this analogy is not very appropriate. The main problem with AI generated images and videos is that, with every improvement, it becomes more and more difficult to distinguish what's real and what's not. That's not something that happened with literacy or printing press or computers.
Think about it: the saturation of content on the Internet has become so bad that people are having a hard time knowing what's true or not, to the point that we're having again outbreaks of preventable diseases such as measles because people can't identify what's real scientific information and what's not. Imagine what will happen when anyone can create an image of whatever they want that looks just like any other picture, or worse, video. We are not at all equipped to deal with that. We are risking a lot just for the ability to spend massive amounts of compute power on generating images. It's not curing cancer, not solving world hunger, not making space travel free, no: it's generating images.
It definitely is easier without AI. Before, if you saw a photo you could be fairly confident that most of it was real (yes, photo manipulation exists but you can't really create a photo out of nothing). Videos, far more trustworthy (and yes, I know that there's some amazing 3D renders out there but they're not really accessible). With these technologies and the rate at which they're improving, I feel like that's going out of the window. Not to mention that the more content that is generated, the easier it is that something slips by despite being fake.
Think about it: the saturation of content on the Internet has become so bad that people are having a hard time knowing what's true or not, to the point that we're having again outbreaks of preventable diseases such as measles because people can't identify what's real scientific information and what's not. Imagine what will happen when anyone can create an image of whatever they want that looks just like any other picture, or worse, video. We are not at all equipped to deal with that. We are risking a lot just for the ability to spend massive amounts of compute power on generating images. It's not curing cancer, not solving world hunger, not making space travel free, no: it's generating images.