Personally, I don't consider myself an artist and don't believe I have an understanding of what it means to be one, which will bias my thoughts on the subject. Still, I'm having some reservations about the ability to endlessly churn out AI-generated content.

In my view, in the past it was believed that to be an artist and produce the output you admire, you had to learn things. You had to be patient, and spend thousands of hours learning a skill. But I don't think it starts and ends with just 10,000 hours of brushstrokes. All that time and effort likely causes other neurological changes owing to the situations that being a traditional artist forced you into, like being exposed to other people and communicating with an audience.

The ability to generate art with prompts bypasses all that time and effort. Using Stable Diffusion, I have made incredible pictures (that I don't consider art), but at the end of the day I still feel like just another person chasing yet another rush of dopamine, the same as it's always been. It's an enabling device. I have never been able to summon the will to practice drawing or painting for enough time to see results, and that hasn't changed. The only difference is that I have the end results, which is mostly what I wanted in the first place, and it's pretty much all I'll ever get with this setup.

But it is often repeated that "focusing on the end results" when trying to learn a creative skill results in bad outcomes. It
is a character flaw that someone has to overcome to get better. Now I feel that 70% of the road to "the end result" can be bypassed without the need to work towards that additional knowledge and virtue.

When artists speak of AI damaging the integrity of their profession, I think this is part of what they mean. For the first time in human history, it is now possible to be a better "artist" without growing into a better person, or developing a wider-scale notion of what existence or the world outside is. The folk assumption that growing up as an artist changes you in fundamental ways (by forcing you to study the craft and observe the world for what it is) has been violated.

The people who treat art as a profession or hobby to work at over thousands of hours, for example, will probably share a lot of significant interactions and bondmaking as their skill gradually improves over the years; not so with a person that can generate pseudo-masterpieces within minutes.

I'm going to guess that the long-term downsides of AI art are going to be baked into cultural norms instead of the limits of silicon. There has already been significant backlash from art circles when tech-oriented people outside of the scene train models in the style of people like Kim Jung Gi, who had just recently passed away. Many people's rules about "art" have gone unwritten for so long because this current situation was unthinkable only a decade ago. Regardless of intent, being seen as plagiarizing the style of someone who is no longer alive isn't a good look.

Still, what I always want to keep buried in my subconscious about how AI art is used and treated is that my insatiable interest in the subject is fueled by my lack of (ability/drive/bravery) to express myself through my own actions, whereas my embarrassment is spared by delegating to a machine to do the work for me and guess what the inner workings of my imagination look like. If this is something I need to overcome, it's only going to get harder for me to do so as the state of the field advances further.

The word that keeps coming to mind when I look over the things I generated is "intent". It doesn't feel like I "made" the things I did, but that I "found" them. There's not a lot of insight to be gleaned except the keywords that each subset of popular culture finds the most useful or interesting in regards to prompt engineering during a particular timeframe. My preoccupation when generating pictures is to find a result that looks nice, not something that carries intentional meaning or context that's greater than the sum of its parts.