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Except for your example today weight lifting does have function. It’s the main means of maintaining a healthy human body.
Watching human weight lifting is a relatively niche sport especially for spectators but they still have ways to validate human versus machine lifting. Which brings up as said elsewhere weight lifters don’t argue for banning cranes. There will likely be a split between art made for production purposes - machine fine - and higher end art that has human provenance. We already do this with artifacts where being 10k years old gets higher prices than a modern replica that looks identical.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-man
In some sense it's grading on a curve, but it's clear that substantial effort and technical expertise (for the tools available at the time) went into these prehistoric sculptures.
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Renaissance works have been filtered and preserved based on quality. Prehistoric art probably went through a much more random series of events and what is left is probably not the pinnacle of the contemporaneous state of art but some random person's makings. But I have no qualifications to say either way, but it seems logical.
There was more than just a little improvement in the Renaissance state of the art, though. Perspective drawing, for the most extreme example, is probably the innovation that gives a painting enough verisimilitude in my eyes for me to really focus on what the painter was trying to depict without being distracted by the obvious flaw of distortions in the depiction.
As an aside, perspective also is a nice counterexample to the "image AIs were just trained on our work, that makes it plagiarism!" theory I see floating around. AI might be producing copyright-infringing works, but learning from other artists' works isn't proof of that. That's just how art works, which is why principles like one-point perspective went undiscovered for millennia only to then see universal uptake within a generation. Renaissance artists didn't all just suddenly get smarter at once (consider the delay before two-point perspective was discovered...), they were all learning from each other's works.
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