FaustNewbie
I think AI is a tool like anything else. I don't mind it's existence and believe it can be useful, like any other tool can be useful. Obviously it can also be misused, and there's plenty of midwits who will treat it like digital satan or digital jesus which doesn't help anyone.
Of course it's unfortunate when people lose their jobs to automation. But I'm not particularly distraught over AI image generators being used for concept art or whatever. The people most vocally complaining about AI images strike me as the same people who gladly cheered for automation back when the consensus was that robots would take over blue collar jobs and leave the white collars alone. Now that everyone realised it's easier to make software replace creatives than hardware replace manual labor people are freaking out but it's hard to feel too much sympathy.
A lot of discourse around AI revolves around whether AI art is truly art. I've only referred to it as AI image generation in this post for a reason. It's an unfortunate quirk of english that the word for art is used interchangeably for paintings or drawings. In other european languages for instance the words are kept strictly separate, but in english it's common to refer to a painting as an artwork first. This isn't extended to other forms of art like books, movies, statues or what have you. Ex. you say "Spielberg's movies" but "Davinci's art". The result is that if an english speaker wants to talk about an image generated by an AI, the natural phrase that comes to his mind is AI art. This then invites someone else to inform him that AI art isn't actually art and the flamewar begins.
Personally I don't believe that any and all media are necessarily art. Not all movies are art, not all statues are art, not all books and not all images. What actually is or isn't is obviously extremely subjective and I'm not going to try and define that here, but I think most would say you need to be sentient, an actual person, to produce art. And so I don't consider AI made images to be art (obviously the guy writing the prompts isn't an artist either, it's still the AI making the actual image). But AI can still generate something useful, same way your wall you pay someone to paint in a single color isn't art but you still want it painted. AI is super helpful for low budget productions and getting mad about people using the tools at their disposal is absurd. There's still place for human painters in the world of actual art but if they get outcompeted in the more practical markets, well that's just unfortunate. Same thing they said to the seamstresses when they made sewing machines and to computers when they made computers.