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I'd like to echo your sentiment and add another example to the mix, although not exactly analogous: I've worked for a few years on a programming project trying to compete with a closed-source service that has a monopoly. If, for whatever reason (it probably won't happen) they decide to open-source their work, I would be livid. To me, the wasted time wouldn't just be about a sunk cost and "no reason to finish," it's because the current WIP is itself pretty impressive, but it wouldn't seem impressive because for all everyone knows I just ripped off the open source version.
I can't really think of anything perfectly analogous to AI art, with how it retroactively invalidates past human effort:
engineering advances cheapen ancient wonders, but you can still appreciate how epic the Pyramids are because they didn't have a crane
things that used to be art (custom tribal weapons) can be manufactured when they have an actual purpose outside of just being art, but you can't mistake an heirloom for a mass-produced widget (Unless you're Anakin Skywalker building a protocol droid)
photography helped artists pivot to non-objective art, but it's unclear how a visual artist is supposed to distinguish their future work from AI-generated pictures, apart from only showing them in physical media.
EDIT: Would like to explicitly distinguish between some things here:
Motte: It's bad that you can't distinguish between AI art and human art.
Bailey: It's bad that AI art reduces the total status of artists.
The invention of cranes probably did reduce the status of powerlifters. In fact, I've heard theories about how technology is making brute strength obsolete in favor of knowledge work and symbol manipulators. That is, when the tribesmen saw big rocks on top of one another they thought, "how wondrous are our power lifters" and after the invention of cranes, they shrug and go, "yeah we can put rocks on top of each other."
If the future of seeing the average logo or image is "yeah our computers are pretty cool i guess" instead of marveling at how beautiful the art is, so what? As long as we can still run powerlifting competitions (where they aren't cranes) and also have curated museums and DeviantArts where somehow we could verify it was human created, isn't that all we need? Granted, that tagging technology might not be feasible.
...Is that not what credits are for? I mean, I'm not well-versed in crediting for open-source software that was made by more than one person, but still, you could probably at least put it on your resume.
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This is exactly the situation with AI art, though. Nothing in the past is invalidated. I can appreciate the skill Van Gogh had to have, because he didn't have a computer program to help him. And conversely, I can still appreciate the skill that an artist today displays even if they could have used a computer program (but chose not to). There's no reason to say that AI art cheapens past, or even future, artistic endeavors in a way that engineering advances didn't for engineering endeavors.
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