It's a shame this is a "zero-skill user" tool as you called it. Definitely one of the best looking ones so far, AI often has a hard time keeping the iris / pupil consistent but it looks decent here! The hair bounces slightly and the blinking looks natural! I know the reason it looks good is because its barely moving the image, there is still a long way to go for tools to properly realize 2D images in a 3D space.
But I can see some uses for some of these tools now, you could add blinking eyes, animated hot breath, background weather conditions, any small thing that can flourish static images.
I am definitely not thrilled about the future of AI generation, I have a feeling it could get pretty dystopian. I am however much more excited for how these tools can ENHANCE art rather than how they can replace it.
Right now I think we're getting the worst end of AI, where it's convincing enough on the surface to blow up social media, but not really practical enough for a big improvement in production.
There is a (bright?) future where a single person will be able to make a complete film using these tools. I don't know what it'll be like when there's a thousand or ten thousand new shows released every year but it sounds like we will live in interesting times.
My worry is that the best tools will remain proprietary and lawfare will be used to remove the open source alternatives.
Some people think that the current tech will cap out and never really be useful - I think this is cope. The capabilities are clearly already there, it's just a matter of controlling them.
It is unnerving for sure - especially when I go to deviantArt or rule34 or even google images and the entire page is destroyed with ai garbo. I've said this before but that's why I feel the need to mess with it, because I need to understand the threat and how to use it.
Oh I guess my other big worry is that we'll enter a completely post-fact world and it'll be impossible to find a verifiably real image of anything. Every book will be rewritten and every image repainted, all recently recorded history will be in doubt, etc.
A pretty valid worry, I'd say. We're already well down the world to a post-factual world, and this kind of thing could easily take us far beyond any recovery point other than everyone becoming a Luddite and destroying tech. And of course, a million dystopian Sci-Fi novels have been written about how THAT turns out.
