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Yeah, this does help clarify the disagreement more. I don't think that more "cheap pleasing images" is a necessary thing, or even a good thing. I think we already had quite enough as it is. There was already a supply glut, we didn't need more. And for me the negative of knowing that say, a book cover might be AI, outweighs any positives that might come from the technical quality of the image itself. I'd gladly trade quality for the guarantee that every image was produced by a human (I tend to have a very eccentric notion of what counts as a "pleasing" image anyway).
Let's explore this more. Do you feel the same way about how most clothes needed to be produced by a tailor, but now they're mass produced for orders of magnitude less money?
What about how bread used to be produced by bakers, but now you can get bread in the store, once again for orders of magnitude less?
I don't know if there's a wrong answer here, but there is a pattern of "these things used to cost way more, but now there are cheaper options that have taken away part of the everyday-niche these things used to do by making it way cheaper. You can still buy the original product that is way more expensive, but the more expensive original versions have been relegated to luxury status."
There certainly is something lost in both cases, yes.
I would prefer it if people formed more relationships with other individuals, rather than with anonymous corporations. That's not the world we live in and we're never going to go back to that world. But, if I were God, that's how I would set things up.
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I've made this argument before. I suspect the overwhelming majority of people expressing public opposition to AI art are wearing shoes which were mass-produced in a factory with little human input. What's more, the machine that assembles these shoes was designed by a human who borrowed techniques developed by trained cobblers (analogous to how generative AI is trained on images created by artists). Everyone seems to have made their peace with this, and while of course they recognise that shoes made by hand and tailored to individual specifications will usually be of superior quality to shoes mass produced by machine, on the margin the mass-produced shoes are good enough for the ordinary consumer. Moreover, the fact that ordinary consumers can afford high-quality shoes is an unalloyed good, as shoes should not be so expensive that only the wealthy can own them.
I think a shoe factory is closer to digital art (like, Photoshop, the free limitless copying and distribution enabled by the internet, and all that those things enable) than it is to AI art. It's not a perfect analogy, but it's closer.
Comparing the differences in attitudes that artists have towards digital art and AI art is instructive. You'll find a few ultra-trads who think it's "cheating", but most people basically learned to live with it, even though it did bring about changes in how art is done and lead to job downsizing in some cases. Similarly with a shoe factory, at least there's still at least one person who actually had to design the shoe in the first place. AI art is a different class of existential threat from digital or the camera because it's the first technology that cuts humans out of the loop entirely.
I'm not sure if this is really the case. You still need someone to write the prompts, which is a skill in itself (albeit a radically different one from the skill of being an artist, and one which is much faster and easier to learn).
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