It's a fascinating article and trend to me. I've been rather obsessed with the amazing technology of text-to-image generation since 2017, when state of the art was an LSTM+GAN and resulted in a blurry image. Now that the technology basically works great, it's just upsetting to a lot of people. I kind of think of AI like making things out of plastic - works pretty well, but basically always resented. Notice that the article couldn't identify anything wrong with the generated image except for how it was made and how no one got paid.

The point of the article is to state that if one needs an explanation or a breakdown of why the AI-generated image is upsetting, then that person might not be a good judge of the qualities and impact of an image in the first place.

That's not to say that this same person isn't the perfect target and consumer, as far as OpenAI is concerned.

AI images had a cool aesthetic and had kind of unpredictable results until around 2022 or 23. Now that anything can be generated quickly and with little effort, it kind of lost the novelty. I'm sure there are people doing some cool things still, but I mostly lost interest.

I mean isn't it like the uncanny valley? it's sort of like "the real thing" aka human created artworks that we traditionally love and connect with, but just far enough that it gives us even more disgust that something completely not human created(like an inanimate object) would.

I personally find AI art both visually pleasing at an unconscious level and vapid at the same time