I hear this often and it's such a strange view of art, like the only thing that matters is scale and speed. It's a perspective so colored by mechanization that it fails to account for other philosophies in art. Think of what, say the Arts and Crafts movement was all about!

> Artists aren't doing it for the money.

That is unlike any artist that I know and I know quite a lot of them. They love their work and the process but they also need to eat. And that included those mentioned above.

Art is about creating something from scratch. This isn't creating anything but cobbling together elements of scraped/stolen content to generate an imitation of prior work.

There is a tremendous amount of "art" that is produced for purely commercial reasons. It employs many thousands of people. These roles are definitely threatened by image generators.

Agree that if you are Artist this is not going to be a big concern to you.

Have you talked to "artists"? In my experience the vast majority say the opposite of what you worded here.

An aspect of art is this pursuit of pushing boundaries within the confines of what is considered good. Would an artist with an infinite image generator be interested in pushing said boundaries? Maybe but they will definitely miss out on getting stuck on an idea and coming up something completely new

AI isn't a tool for creating art in the same way as a paintbrush or clay. AI is describing a painting you want, then having someone else creating the artwork for you. You aren't doing art in the same way hiring a sculptor isn't doing sculpting.

AI is well on the way to eliminating human made art since the skills to actually make art will be lost to the skill of being able to describe art. You know, since the only thing that matter is reducing costs.

>Art is about pushing limits of what's possible

That's engineering, if that.

Art isn't, and has never been about that.

>Art is about pushing limits of what's possible and AI just raises those limits

Says who?

Being an artist means different things to different people, but at the very least I believe it requires an interest in your craft, a desire for personal growth, and a yearning to express yourself.

Yet somehow with AI art we end up with https://i.redd.it/3v2uwwxxkhkg1.png more often than https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/73/Michelan...

The only thing AI art makes possible that wasn't possible before is the scale of slop

The Sistine Chapel was a commission.

Taste is not scaleable.

Absolutely.

It worked semi ok? A poor depiction, but not entirely nonsensical

https://g.co/gemini/share/028ab360006b

It was until ~2021 and it going rapidly downhill. I know some people that are really good at art and they got work on commission from publications, venues and so on. They have seen a significant drop in their bookings and the ones that they do get negotiate hardball because (1) everybody else is desperate too and (2) if they can't get to a deal then AI is now an alternative for the not-so-discerning public which was a fairly large chunk of the usecases.

So you were making book covers? Ah, so sorry. Nobody really cared that it was you.

And you can probably extend that to what's between the covers...

Is it though? It was for the last 20 years but I’d imagine sales of commissions are down immensely and going down every day

On the contrary, the talent will be more scarce because there is no longer a motivation to acquire it in the first place.

Most people no. Then again most people are idiots barely aware of the world they live in, much less culture.

People who actually care about art, if given a chance to see it, yes.

Of course, it being done by Davinci is not some random fact about the painting - as if a painting is a mere artifact.

Da Vinci is maybe only the 5th most interesting thing about the Mona Lisa.

Yes, who gives a shit about culture, after all humanity doesn't really need it...

Absolutely not a chance. You see, in the past there was nothing to train it on. And that's sort of the point: the only reason that this AI image generation works at all is because it is lifting on the hard work of the people that had the skills, put the time and the effort in.