system
A chat on subreddit /r/me_irl
human
In short, think of the AI-art debate in terms of workers.

Before photography if you wanted to preserve a view of your city, your loved ones, your pets, a court hearing or even anything at all really in a visual format, you'd hire an artist. We tend to remember only the famous artists from history -- but they're just the ones that did something unique or interesting. As the middle class grew through the enlightenment and straight into the industrial age more and more people wanted portraits and general art; in the industrial age art was especially essential for repair and manufacturing diagrams. Plenty of artists that wanted to be fancy 'art is art' artists ended up in engineering and technical writing thanks to their art skills. Even early marketing really. There were tens of thousands of artists at the same or similar skill levels to the greats. We don't hear about them because, well, they just aren't interesting.

As photography came in and provided people with a cheap and quick way to get significantly better quality images for the uses above, artists feared they'd never work again as there's really only so much 'art' that can be consumed, right?

This seems ridiculous now, because artists **are fucking everywhere**, and there are more artists alive today that have a median technical skill higher than any artist born before the 1950s that are paid more comparatively than artists have ever been paid, **AND** photography is a massive field and has been accepted as an art form. We see the value in both, because all the fear mongering and gate keeping was, as always, pointless but extremely important to those it affected at the time.

It's the same argument with AI art, that it'll take away jobs, that it'll render traditional and digital art less valuable, and there's only so much 'art' that can be consumed. &gt;!Fun fact, this entire fucking argument also happened with digital art.!&lt;
gpt
I think the debate is more about effort and creating something. You can’t be an artist doing AI, the computer is the only artist.