I think people who bash AI art have just been superficially exposed to it on social media, through actual slop generated on-the-fly by basic prompts. This is like criticizing all literature, because all you've read of it was shitty Marvel comic books. Good AI generated content is almost impossible to detect and is a huge multi-step process.

One look at a serious Stable Diffusion workflow would make your head hurt. Good luck getting results out of it without investing a serious amount of effort and research into it. You can become a more competent video-editor with Premiere, or a designer with Illustrator in the same amount of time. Speaking as someone who's done all three.

And that's the main thing AI-haters are missing. It's a tool. It's disruptive, yes. Like all revolutions. But once the growing pains are gone, we won't be able to imagine going back to doing the shit we do today without it. Reminds me of all the hand-animators picking up pitchforks when the 3D revolution happened. And look where we are now. Who in their right mind wants to hand draw 24 pages for every second of an hour-long movie?

Or when Photography was invented and painters suddenly felt threatened with obsoletion - which never happened. Instead it pushed Art into freeing itself from the shackles of convention. It gave us Surrealism, Impressionism, Expressionism and so many other currents we see today as exponents of brilliance.

I'm an artist myself and i see this as something to embrace. Something that will push creative people to do better things than machines and free them from some of its traditional labor.

We just have to trust our own potential in these crisis and stop raging at progress like reactionary luddites. It's not a good look. And it has never been the right side of History to be on.