Another area where prices have increased due to AI because a bunch of soulless chronically online people can feel better about themselves.

Mind you, human-painted artwork is a niche beyond expensive art. Not everyone buys the equivalent of Monet paintings. I've been eyeing a painting by a local painter just to realize the prices jumped from $500 to something like $3000 on average. Sucks.

I'm not sure what you're saying. Is the claim that the artist raised the cost of his work 6x because he's getting less work, because people are using AI instead? Maybe I'm in a bubble, but that doesn't seem credible. I'm trying to imagine the person that was thinking that they would hire a local artist to paint them a painting and then discovered AI and instead asked Gemini to do it. Those just seem like two completely separate use cases.

Are you saying that artists getting payed more is a bad thing?

How are the prices a problem? If a person is just looking for a picture not a particular artist or philosophical theories, AI is cheaper. If a person wants to commission an artist, that was always a semi luxury even for cheapest of cheap rate online artists.

In fact if your old price was already 500 dollars then its already a useless luxury. People think a lot before paying 500 even for actual tools, anyone who has 500 to spend on a non-essential luxury is already doing something most people don't have any need to.