The world is filled with brilliant people.
My experience is with sound designers. The nub of the art is to remain
invisible, unobtrusive. A good sound designer is never noticed.
Many created the synth patches for famous music keyboards like the
Korg M-series or Yamaha DX-series, and they hear their sounds on the
radio/Spotify every single day attributed to someone else... some band
name or whatever.
I'm sure there are folks here who designed amazing VFX
plugins/algorithms and recognise their work in Hollywood blockbusters,
and know that the VFX "artist" simply used the default settings.
So I'd go further: most of the designers whose work forms part of
our daily lives are people "you've never heard of". Like people who
design road layouts for traffic safety, design road signs, public
information. They're hardly household names.
If working in human fields of arts, design and entertainment has
taught me anything it's that even though some extreme egos can drive
success, self-advancement and skill are on absolutely orthogonal axes.
And as the (very good) discussion here yesterday about billionaire
lottery winners went.... most "successful" tech names also are nothing
but the arbitrary outcomes of the slings and arrows of outrageous
fortune and hindsight "winner" bias. There were ten other garage
computer builders who had better products than Woz and Jobs, and a
dozen better search engine designs than Page rank... But we need a
narrative that makes a few people "heroes", because that's what keeps
the show running.
We've yet to design/discover a way of being that celebrates the bottom
part of the iceberg - the thousands of enablers of every "star", often
whose work is plundered. "AI stealing Art" is the natural outcome of
this blindside.