i think the ai art thing is really about, people aren't comfortable with their own disinterest in things. they don't want to make art but they want to want to. they can't make themselves want to. but that's not ok with them. but they imagine it would feel good to have made art
I think the foundation of "artists are elitists for gatekeeping art" is just a smoke screen by actual nefarious people who are using this technology for its true purpose, which is to flood the world with middling, cheap labor. But capitalist globalization is another topic entirely.
There is one "valid" target for this kind of stuff, and it's not just people who have been tricked into thinking they should be generating art (aka "product" or "content"). This comes from my own twitter thread, but I think it's kind of people like me. People who developed some amount of artistic skill through decades of constant practice, but never reached the place they were aiming to get to.
I came up during the rise of the anime boom and my skills at proportions never got good enough to draw like that. But I desperately wanted to. Around the mid-to-late 2000's I ended up entering several art contests, and got snubbed so badly I didn't even make it into the honorable mentions. I had worked so hard on those entries that I injured my hands with RSI, and it eventually developed in to slowly worsening carpal tunnel syndrome. I was so frustrated with what happened (on top of developing new creative interests) I basically gave up drawing entirely for many years. Almost any time I'd try, it would result in a barely-coherent sketch that made me too upset to finish.
Eventually, at some point, I realized this was stupid. I needed to force myself to try again. So I came up with little ways to get me drawing again, under the mantra that it didn't really matter if it was good, as long as it was finished. I couldn't let my talents go to waste. So I started doing artwork for my Youtube videos. Whether it was traditional pencil-drawn art that was colored digitally...
Or turned into pixel art...
Now I've looped back around and reached a kind of understanding and acceptance of my artistic ability (including my limits). I've even occasionally started drawing for fun again. But there was a large window of time where I was deeply unhappy with where I was artistically, and felt like I'd never finish climbing that mountain (because that's the wrong way to look at art, for one).
And I can see a lot of real would-be artists, people who feel inadequate about their talent, who think it's slipping through their fingers like it was for me, look at this AI art stuff and think: "Finally, my shortcut. I've been studying art for ten years, but I don't need to spend the rest of my life working and failing at it. I'm savvy enough that I can just have the machine fill in my blanks."
It's still that crisis of identity, and perhaps an even worse one: because these aren't people being fooled into doing something they're not good at, they're being fooled into giving up. That this technology can "fix" them.
It can't. You can only fix yourself. How you view yourself, and your work, and how much you value what you produce. All this tech does is flood art channels with muddy sewage until you can't see anything anymore. You are hurting yourself and the entire artistic community.
i feel like non artists view art really weirdly for some reason .. like its so widespread? ive met so many people in my life who "want" to draw but see no value in learning and they just settle on the opinion that the universe gave me a secret special power that they cant have bc theyre not the chosen one. maybe im forgetting or just unaware. but i really dont think ive seen ppl do this with other interests? like theres this OBSESSION with creating art omg i Wish i could draw!!! what do u mean i could learn. fuck off thats not worth my time. omg i wishhh i could drawwww. ive had people get angry at me for just having a skill bc i "get to draw" like theyre not allowed. like its my fault they dont wanna practice