This.

It also just occurred to me, inspired by your comment, that getting to know a mind is more than just satisfying your curiosity; personal experience confirms for me that as soon as I interacted with a brilliant mind, some of that shone back on me, and made me a tad more brilliant as well.

We always want to be among the people we imagine or visualise our future better selves to be. It's such an absolutely fundamental part of humanity (it is how children become adults, too)

The reason "AI artists" engage in a spiral of angrily and defensively explaining that their process is not just pushing a button, or trying to project AI-like attributes onto existing things like "covering someone else's song" (which is what the Fender CEO recently did!!) is that we all know that, deep down, using AI to do creative things people did is less in at least some way. It's avoiding some emotional labour.

People who know this less is a big part of what they do are the ones who need to reckon with it.

Everyone else is free to mentally downgrade it just like they also mentally downgrade excessive photoshop, overproduction, etc., and they will.

It took a generation for the world to find any kind of accommodation with what photoshop is capable of, what is appropriate and what is not, and there are aspects we are still justifiably angry about (fraud, deception, body image). AI artists seem in a hurry to have their own use normalised; they want people to hurry up and get over it and use it themselves so they don't feel bad.

Many photographers have developed rules for what they will and will not retouch, even a century before photoshop — for example, if the spot on someone's face won't be there in a fortnight, it maybe even shouldn't be in a photograph that is intended to be a long-lasting, somewhat authoritative representation of that person. But this took a long time to become any kind of cultural norm.

I think AI-only coders and CEOs are also in this "hurry up and get over it so I feel OK about my choices" phase, and I think we need to see this in a clear-minded way if we are to confront its impacts.