You say those things like they're a short step away, but that might not be how it works out.

For example, AI has made zero progress in the last few years in surpassing professionals at art or writing. Its prompt-following skill is much better, and sure, it can render hands and text now, but its artistic sensibility is completely stagnant.

I think, and I may be totally off base, that the labs are specifically avoiding art and (non-technical) writing as an endpoint. It's bad PR for them- it calls attention to the copyright question and threatens the 'human flourishing' kind of jobs- and there's no money in it because people prefer art to be human made and there's hardly any money in that anyway.

The difference is that artistic sensibility is largely subjective. This means that:

1. It's hard to measure (and people can disagree about it)

2. It can't really be improved using RL without a human in the loop (which is how math is being trained)

Art is so entwined with the human condition that generative AI which conjures output from a statistical pass over background noise is bound to be stagnant.

Obviously it can impersonate art, but where creativity and the human story matter artists need not worry.

AI is no match for rapidly shifting goalposts ;)

What are you even talking about? The last few years, AI has made an insanely big jump in capabilities, performance, accuracy. It destroyed the carrier of a ton of writers and can generate images that are good enough to bamboozle people into thinking it's human made, that sounds like an insanely big leap to me, and yes it can be very creative and in music as well, I would bet it beats already 90% of musicians (most musicians are not that competent).