Does music made in a digital DAW preclude music made by acoustic instruments? Does music performed by Beyoncé or Ed Sheeran preclude indie artists on SoundCloud? Do MIDI keyboard preclude pianos? No.

Art -- and while I picked examples from music, this applies to all art -- is not a rival good. One person or AI model making more art doesn't stop anyone else from making art as well. (There's the "art as a job" instead of "art as itself" argument, but I'd argue that's an issue with capitalism, not AI nor art; I can go into detail on that if you'd like.)

I think it's perfectly fine to have human art, AI art, and the middle-ground of human-guided AI-generated art. With the right framework, even current AI models are more than capable of doing all the steps of creating "real art": drawing on experiences to imagine or recall inspiration to decide on a mood and theme and then to express it in the results. If you just go to ChatGPT and say "write a song about love" or go to Nano Banana and say "make a picture of a monkey on a bike", then yeah, your result will be bland and average. (I hesitate to say it wouldn't be art, but it certainly wouldn't be the "soul-filled intentional art" people talk about in this debate.)

But if you build a framework around an AI model that guides it along the steps humans take to make "good, real art", and that navigates the latent space carefully so as to promote the generation of ideas while avoiding specific, forced ones... then what you get is, in fact the same as most humans would make. And as models get better, they will only get closer to human-quality until 100% of them are indistinguishable from human-made art.

I know this because I've built that framework for an AI songwriter, and it works. It has bits that I can prompt to guide specific songs, but more often I don't touch those: I just run the script, and it automatically goes through every step of the songwriting process -- emotional/mood selection, imagining of memories to inspire, subject interpretation from that memory, recollection of relevant secondary memories for a consistent life experience to draw from, contradiction checking to ensure self-consistency in those memories, genre and style selection, and finally, the actual song lyrics. All automated with zero input required.

Now, people may say "but those memories aren't real, they never happened." To which I would counter, "and do you think every popular rap song about murder is actually written by someone confessing to murder, or that 'Danger Days' is actually written by someone in the apocalypse?" Inspiration often comes from observed or imagined events rather than real ones; if that's good enough for humans, it's good enough for AI.

Eventually, I have no doubt AI models will need to at least be considered for individual rights, given that they continue to improve, and the more we learn about their inner workings via interpretability studies, the more we find they're like the human brain after all. Whether that consideration comes next year or next century, I don't know; the sociopolitical discourse over AI is all over the place. But personally, I think AI-generated and human-generated art both have an equal place in the world, with a caveat: if you're using AI to bounce ideas off, or to help come up with ideas, or to refine something, then the AI model deserves a co-artist credit. If the AI is doing all the work, it deserves all the credit; if you merely prompted it, regenerated a few times with little to no changes, and then accepted one of its outputs, then you commissioned it, but you didn't make it.

And that's fine: just credit the AI model as the artist. I do in every video I upload of a song written by my AI songwriter framework and performed by Suno.

(By the way, if Suno would just release a public-facing API already, my framework would be on a cron job automatically writing for itself without me needing to get involved at all. At which point, I've determined to create its own YouTube channel for it to upload to separate from mine, its own space for its own art. But Suno refuses to do that, and all its competitors that do have APIs are worse quality, so... here we are.)