My current bugbear is how art is held up as creativity and worthy of societal protection and scorn against AI muscling in on it

While the same people in the same comments say it’s fine to replace programming with it

When pressed they talk about creativity, as if software development has none…

I haven't heard writers make any kind of stance on software engineering, but Brandon Sanderson has very publicly renounced AI writing because it lacks any kind of authentic journey of an authors own writing. Just as we would cringe at our first software projects, he cringes at his first published novel.

I think that's a reasonable argument to make against generative art in any form.

However, he does celebrate LLM advancements in health and accessibility, and I've seen most "AI haters" handwave away its use there. It's a weird dissonance to me too that its use is perfectly okay if it helps your grandparents live a longer, and higher quality of life, but not okay if your grandparents use that longer life to use AI-assisted writing to write a novel that Brandon would want to read.

The easiest job to automate is someone else’s.

Art has two facets. First is if you like it. If you do, you don't need to care where it came from. Second is the art as cultured and defined by the artistic elites. They don't care if art is liked or likable, they care about the pedigree, i.e. where it came from, and that it fits what they consider worthy art. Between these two is what I call filler art: stuff that's rather indifferent and not very notable, but often crosses over some minimum bar that it's accepted by, and maybe popular among average people who aren't that seriously interested in art.

In the first category, AI is no problem. If you enjoy what you see or hear, it doesn't make a difference if it was created by which kind of artist or AI. In the second category, for the elite, AI art is no less unacceptable than current popular art or, for that matter, anything at all that doesn't fit their own definition of real art. Makes no difference. Then the filler art.. the bar there is not very high but it will likely improve with AI. It's nothing that's been seriously invested in so far, and it's cheaper to let AI create it rather than poorly paid people.

a lot of artists don't mind use AI for art outside their field

I was in a fashion show in tokyo in 2024.

i noticed their fashion was all human designed. but they had a lot of posters, video, and music that was AI generated.

I point blank asked the curator why he used AI for some stuff but didn't enhance the fashion with AI. I was a bit naive because I was actually curious to see if AI wasn't ready for fashion or maybe they were going for an aesthetic. I genuinely was trying to learn and not point out a hypocrisy.

he got mad and didn't answer. i guess it is because they didn't want to pay for everything else. big lesson learned in what to ask lol.

Maybe that's because AI "art" looks just as cringe as written AI slop.