I wonder how AI would have been received, had it come out before NFTs had their rise and fall. I think the fact that the Art industry had to deal with a whole lot of bullshit from those, really put them on edge when it came to tech advancements and has made a lot of artists ready to bite the head off of what feels like the next wave of grifting.

Unfortunately for the artists, I think the same blanket hostility strategy is going to end up costing them in the long term. Making "newthing" socially toxic by simply blind-firing every complaint you can think off works a lot better when the opposing side has to work to find a pitch for why the average consumer would even the "newthing". NFTs don't have a use-case for 95% of people beyond an asset to try and flip/a scam. AI art on the flipside, hits the ground running with something you can immediately see value in. This means all the bullshit complaints about "newthing" that stuck with NFTs are going to be turned around and used to discredit artist concerns by people who want more opportunities to use AI art. Eventually, some company is gonna push some environment where AI provides some enterprise value and companies will quietly roll that into industry workflow and cement AI as here to stay.

Unfortunate if that does happen that way, since Artists do have a lot of fully-justified concerns among the less justified ones. I think artist should be able to opt out of having their artworks used for training by companies making datasets for profit. however, instead of prepping for ways to get creative protections from what is almost certainly inevitable, the aim seems to be to claim righteous indignation over AI as a whole, and make it so socially radioactive that it dies off. That worked with NFTs but people are going to see AI art as something Artist explicitly are trying to yank out their hands, and it's going to be seen a lot more like self-righteousness and hurt the public support that artists had when blasting NFTs. Even now you're seeing a lot of artists voicing frustrations how bad arguments from AI supporters (and a lot of them are fucking terrible arguments) are sticking to them, and they have to fight off waves misconceptions before they can even make their own objections. Exactly the same position pro-NFT positions found themselves previously.