In the 1990s there was a backlash against Photoshop. Traditional artists and designers viewed Photoshop as "cheating," "not real art," and a threat to hand-made craft. This story [1] from 17 years ago called for a ban on airbrushed photos. Today use of Photoshop and airbrushing is standard practice, and it is expected. In time we will come to accept AI art too.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2009/sep/19/liberal-dem...

Yes, just like we accepted steroids in sports.

I'm hoping something of the opposite happens.

I still see airbrushing, along with things like music quantization, auto-tune (and manual tuning), "perfect" design, etc etc, as hugely problematic (well, airbrushing is the worst with tangible social harms among the things I listed there). All of these things are possible to use artfully, but that they've become the norm is actually pretty gross, and many people haven't so much accepted them as they have been beaten into submission to stop complaining about them.

I think this is really lost on anyone making the argument that "we've seen this before and everyone will just succumb."

What I've noticed is how much "booster" types say that "This is unlike anything that has ever happened before" and yet somehow they think the general acceptance story is going to play out "like it always does." I'm getting into "vibes" territory here because I have no data, but the AI-backlash does feel much stronger than before. I feels like there are a lot more non-artists getting not-so-trivially pissed off about this bullshit. We'll see, I guess.