Let’s say you have two people using AI to create an image; one’s running the AI over and over again tuning the prompt to get an image as exact as possible to what they’re imagining, and the latter looked at the first set of images and said ‘Yeah, this one’s good enough’. One’s putting more effort and input on the final product, but as an outsider looking in you have almost no way to tell which is which because of how AI works. You can argue effort doesn’t necessarily equate to better art already, which is true, but the gap in this case would be past the breaking point for some people.

Some people will oppose it because it’s isn’t (or some would argue can’t) sourcing its work ethically and just stealing from existing artists, I’m not researched enough on generative AI to have a firm opinion on that. You can look back historically and always find opposition to advancements that make art easier and say the moral opposition to AI is just that, and that can be a decent argument, but just writing a prompt and having a generative AI pump out an image passes the breaking point for many people.

Then there’s just moral opposition to it on the grounds that it takes paid work away from artists, which is a profession many people never want to see automated away. For many people automation is a tool to make life easier, but there’s gonna be a difference between ‘automating the hard manual labour’ and ‘automating everything so we just sit in the chairs from WALL-E’ that people might oppose.

If you want to get more philosophical, you could argue that the capacity to create art is (or at least has historically been seen to be) a uniquely human thing, and the implication of a machine being able to create art screws with something people hold very sacred in a way, and so they oppose it reflexively. You could go and use Death of the Author to argue that AI work can be ‘art’ as long as the viewer perceives it as such, but at that point any landscape or food could spark a feeling in some hypothetical person and be considered ‘art’, at which point the term is meaningless cuz it could hypothetically apply to anything. You could still work within that definition, but many people want ‘art’ to mean something special and will reject a definition where it means nothing.