I’m going to play devil’s advocate and present a hypothetical alternative here…
Visual art is not about portraying something in such or such specific manner (be it realism, surrealism, or whatever else) it is about sharing an experience (which no AI can do, as it doesn’t live and can’t experience shit by itself) and it is about sharing an emotion that can be ranging from the pure emotional one to the most cerebral.
AI art is boring.
I’d argue that in some applications, this is fine. For example, corporate logos, the equivalent of clip art in presentations, etc. You can argue that that isn’t really ‘art’ in the sense that you’re describing it, but whatever you want to call it, personally, I don’t care if no artist has to do that BS. I highly doubt many artists really want to be doing that stuff. The problem isn’t that AI is being used to generate soulless art for soulless projects, it’s that it’s taking work away from real artists (and that we as modern humans, as a whole, put so much weight on employment).
If we gave UBI to creatives that covered all of their expenses and let them pursue whatever projects they wanted to work on (and thereby we still, as a species, got to enjoy the actual art by actual artists), would it be so bad that the shitty work is being done by a computer? Theoretically there’d be more ‘real’ art, since artists wouldn’t have to waste their time on the bullshit. Let’s go back to a system of patronage, where society as a whole become the patrons.
Completely agree with you here. If the technology was being developed and made available to everyone for non-commercial use, while they charged for the commercial use cases, I’d have less of an issue with it (aside from the obvious and serious objection that they’re functionally stealing creatives’ work and profiting off of it - but again, I think this objection could be invalidated with UBI.)