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Notes -
The programming parallel makes sense to me, and there are plenty of similar parallels throughout history. Humans using technology in order to make arduous processes easier, leading to each human having much more leverage leading to that level of leverage being the norm, with additional technologies built on top of that to make those processes easier, and so on and so forth. In the past, it might have been the wheel or a cart or a bow or a plow or a car, right now AI is one of them.
And at each step in the process, it seems like there have been people who were accustomed to the old norm decrying the new one as some abomination that lacked the "soul" or "essence" of the thing. A digital artist today is standing on the shoulders of giants, relying on the hardware and software development of engineers to contribute to their art, including the specific choice of brush strokes that the software developers programmed in. They would balk at traditional artists who insist that you must actually put paint on canvas using a brush that you control physically, in order to capture the subtle nuances of the muscle movements that result from the unique set of training that the artist went through. And those artists would balk at even more traditional artists who insist that you must actually construct your own brushes by gluing together hair that you gather manually and mix your own paint, in order to capture the subtle nuances of the choices you made when constructing the tools that show up in the final result due to the tools being used. And those artists would balk at even more traditional artists who insist that you must actually raise the animal from which the brush hair came from and tended to the tree from which the wood in the brush or painting surface came from, in order to capture the subtle nuances of the choices you made when prepping the raw material for the tools.
And each of these people would have a point. A very good point worth making. But the point would largely be lost on the person listening, who doesn't particularly see those as worth the trade-off of losing the immense amount of efficiency and creative freedom. After all, with the additional efficiency, now they can create far greater, broader, and deeper works of art than with the previous methods. But to someone who's used to the old norms, these efficiency gains just look like shortcuts that only have a cargo cult understanding of the process.
AI generated imagery is different, in just how much of a leap in abstraction it is compared to the other ones. A digital artist still has skills that would transfer very well to painting on canvas. An AI tool user's skill doesn't need to go far beyond basic Photoshop skills and a basic artistic compositional skills. It's still so early right now that I don't think it's possible to tell, but based on how I've seen actual artists use AI generated images the last few weeks, I suspect that it will be more similar to the other ones than different; that in time, we'll see it as just another tool to increase an artist's leverage in expressing themselves.
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