It is insane to me that a large amount of people in my industry see nothing wrong about AI Art. Or even that some see it as somewhat problematic but do not get angry about it. It's as though they can't see more than a couple years into the future, regardless of my sermonizing and analogies they just can't put the square peg in the square hole.
Let's look beyond their sight, into the far future of 20 years, when AI art has long been perfected. Beyond this utopia they believe that they are building for themselves. It's absorbed the data it needs and has finally developed a model that won't mess up hands and feet. In fact it has been depicting them perfectly, in any style available.
Well then.
What then?
A child is born. They love art, but are conscious that their guardians merely keep their drawings on the fridge to appease them. They struggle at drawing their circles well, while an AI churns out hundreds of thousands of finished, perfect art every second around the world. They give up, seeing the pursuit of art as a dead end.
They just have to contend with the fact that they'll need to cut that part of their heart out. They'll never be able to make money as an artist, since large studios are using AI art, and AI art is constantly being snuck into independent circles, being passed off as someone's hard work. Art schools are slowly transformed into only studying the history of art. Knowledge of artists and famous styles is more important than awkwardly stumbling your way into your own style that will simply be absorbed into the machine anyways.
And time goes on, with so many more children coming to face the same reality of this dismal time; that their passion is worthless, and efforts to improve are a waste of time.
And more time passes, and all of the AI art is self-regurgitating. AI models feeding off of AI art over and over again. Text submitted for generated art no longer has any new entries for "In the style of ____." There is no new voice to join the chorus, merely new lyrics being blared through speakers in the voices of the long dead.
Style is dead, visual expression is dead, everything is just a series of text prompts rendered with unparalleled skill... not that there is anyone to challenge it anymore.
There are no ideas, only prompts. Our eyes and ears lie to us each minute of each day. The news anchor that spouts stories of crimes which never happened to people that have never existed died long ago, and continues to drone on because the company that employed them have the rights to their likeness.
People live in a world where nothing is earned, because putting effort into your passion is counterproductive. Where all that they read, listen to and watch is generated specifically for them. Their masturbatory entertainment is an echo chamber that they can never escape.
Anyways, fuck AI art. This isn't even a pessimistic take, this is realistically what will happen down the line. And all this talk is about AI Art specifically. These idiots proposing incubator projects for their companies for generating code are like lambs bringing cleavers to a butcher. Management are realistically the easiest jobs to replace, but if we're bending over backwards to replace ourselves.