It's always refreshing to see someone else who actually cares about art engaging in these fora but I don't entirely agree with either point.

> 1. It can't actually communicate anything, as it's a fake simulation that lacks essential elements ("AI" art is to art as playing Guitar Hero is to playing a real guitar).

I think people can use NN image generated images to communicate nearly as much as they could by commissioning a piece from an artist with the skills to make the piece-- which I think is a much better analog than a guitar hero controller. Your take would mean art directors don't communicate anything visually because they didn't make all of the pieces they used. Indeed it is far more difficult-- probably impossible in most cases-- to communicate specific, intentional, and nuanced things with AI generated images as we would with any medium involving an artist directly making marks or using physical media.

Using procreate even without a smoothed brush removes the ability for a very skilled practitioner to make marks as expressive as they are accustomed to. Those procreate marks still communicate-- for dilettante painters like me, even moreso than using a physical brush-- but they don't have the specificity or control that a physical brush does. Procreate makes decisions about each stroke that limit the possibility of both error and expression. As a result, to get the results that would satisfy them, a professional painter would need to spend a LOT LONGER in Procreate to get equivalent results. Though all of it is obviously a hell of a lot more expressive than even the fussiest and most detailed NN image generation workflows. Just as People who've only used digital painting tools often have no idea how much more experience and technique real paint requires, people that think their familiarity with the generative tool chain and prompt wrangling rarely understand how many decisions those models are still making for them.

But the ability to actually create images is not the big selling point for artists, despite what many in this space ostensibly think. I reckon the failure to communicate specific, interesting things which you're picking up on is the lack of visual communication skills among the vast majority of people using these tools. There's a whole lot of people climbing Mt. Stupid, just like with any other newly popular technology. However, understanding what an image is communicating to us through many layers of context and subcontext is a hard-won skill that that is adjacent to actually making images. Since gen AI spits out flashy amalgamations of other people's visually compelling work, even complete novices can make something superficially appealing. Most people just don't understand how different that is from what professional artists do, and that's why I'm confident my career is safe. I feel really bad for people whose market is high-volume sales with lower-effort work to people who don't have any way to judge if it's good work, like people that spit out derivative logos for hobby businesses or whatever on Fiverrrrrr. I can't say I find that stuff interesting from a professional or artistic standpoint, but they were doing honest and underpaid work and are suddenly screwed because someone used their own work against them. I've never seen anyone answer to that fact with anything other than edgelord survival of the fittest bullshit or copout by conflating laws with ethics, some hamfisted pontifications about the "true" nature of art, some glib nonsense how human-like ML is, some bullshit about artists being "privileged," or a butchered version of "smash all copyrights" which deliberately ignores that when the rubber hits the road, big corporations are exactly who will benefit most in this case, which defeats the original purpose of the idea.

> 2. It's a wholly derivative rehash of existing art that will ultimately lead to artistic stagnation (as most art creation becomes a deskilled, automated task, knocking out the first step in the pipeline of artistic innovation).

I think your take is more hopeful than mine in some ways. There might be some amount of deskilling in the general populace, but fine art certainly isn't going anywhere, and higher-end commercial art will almost certainly still be done largely by humans-- those two forces break most of the aesthetic ground in our society without most people even realizing it. (It's honestly kind of shocking to see how little most people perceive of the of art and design that imbue our lives.)

I just think it will become yet another piece of humanity for corporations to vacuum up and commoditize. People crow about keeping it free and open-- well, as we can see from the rest of the end-user Linux ecosystem, usability is a lot more consequential to most people than licensing or nominal fees. Most people capable of jumping through the technical hoops to install SD seem not to be aware of how few others are willing to do the same, in the grand scheme of things. This being "open" will affect a tiny number of people-- maybe even smaller than Desktop Linux. Everyone else will pay. Rich get richer. Commercial artists-- already consistently shit on by most industries-- get shit on harder.

While many pros will (and already do) use generative AI for minor roles in their work, it will involve far less text prompting than many people currently realize. I do find SD useful for grabbing a pose reference or popping out a quick mood board, but the prospect of any of this stuff finding its way into deliverable content for the sort of work I do is laughable. The copycat tool in Nuke or the generative fill tool in Photoshop are what generative AI tools look like professional pipelines-- parameter driven, specific, expressive, abstract, fast, deterministic by default, and predictable.

I think that many, many non-professional artists will always make art the way they always have because having the piece at the end isn't always even the point of making it. Some people who need props or decor might like a machine that inexpensively spat out Japanese rock gardens, but that sure as hell won't stop the practice. However, the cost of having an online community or advertising your skills online will essentially require feeding the machines that allowed large corporations to lop the bottom off of the commercial art market. Just like most of us pay for our desire for community in an online world with our communication metadata, we professional artists will pay more directly and dearly for this fundamentally human desire for connection around a shared interest.