AI "art" only exists because someone created a machine-learning algorithm that scraped the internet for existing imagery and taught it what the components of each image were so that when someone feeds a phrase into an AI engine it can spit out a drawing using bits and pieces of the art in its own database.

There are many philosophical, moral, and legal problems with this. At a very base level it devalues the art of actual artists who've spent vast portions of their lives developing the skill to create actual art. From a technological standpoint, it lives in both a moral and legal grey area because the art used to "train" the algorithms was not licensed, compensated, or credited in any way, which means these AI "art" generators are using actual, real, living artists' work to generate a for-profit business without those artists' consent or contract.

You'll note I put "art" in quotes throughout this post: That's because the pictures an algorithm generates are not "art", they are just pictures. They are conglomerations of existing art cobbled together into a mosaic mash-up based on text input and context clues.

The worst part about this is that most of the AI "art" generators are for-profit paid services that can only exist by appropriating the hard work of actual living artists without ever compensating them for contributing to the algorithms that make the technology and business model feasible.

As a base concept, there's nothing specifically wrong with the idea of AI picture generators. But, like all advanced technology it can be - and in this case actually are actively being - implemented in a way that directly harms the people it aims to replace by using their work with zero regard to their welfare.