I’m not so much talking about tools that use AI to edit or adjust art like photoshop, I’m talking more about AI that is using human created art as fuel to produce art whole cloth (like Midjourney/Stable Diffusion).

I can just add a tag “Simon Stalenhag” and it replicates his style, and it knows how to do that because of the scraped content it uses, content that Stalenhag himself created. It’s a novel style that he developed over a lot of time through effort, observation and thought, it’s an expression of him as an individual and his life long experience in the world, all just for a tech bro to scrape all his art off the internet, blend it into his art slurry and say “Thanks man, best of luck with your career now that some random can reproduce your work with a few sentences, no hard feelings, just adapt.”

It’s pretty insulting honestly. Someone writing a string of words is not an artist, they’re still just a client. So when you say “some artists will be replaced” you’re talking about the actual creatives themselves. They will be replaced by techs essentially. And no one will undersrand why that matters until all the media they consume starts to look and feel the same.

Humans won’t stop producing art, but they will be more reticent to publish what they personally create in a professional arena if the hard earned novelty of their own work is just going to inevitably get hoovered up and cookie-cuttered by a computer. Why would they bother offering anything of themselves in any professional capacity if in the end they just end up at the same level as someone who has never picked up a pencil in his life? It’s the dronification of artists that is disturbing, as if the individual who creates the art is simply a obstacle that needs to be overcome to get at the value they can produce.