Keep in mind that "NFTs representing digital art" are a subset of what NFTs are. GenAI might have impacted art tokens, but wouldn't affect NFTs as a whole.
That’s right, NFT’s are a tool for low talent charlatans to grift at scale off of laypeople by claiming they will make money buying them. The digital art was just one such con.
The concept of NFTs for art is pretty new. I first heard about the idea of NFTs in 2013 and that was using them for things like deeds to land and vehicles.
which is incredibly stupid because a nft is fundamentally incapable of solving these challenges (owning the nft means nothing if a court determines someone else owns the house)
... which remains a terrible idea, because what happens to your land or vehicle if you lose your keys / forget your pass phrase? Or if someone else phishes you?
The whole idea of GenAI is to make purely digital content "cheap."
And that's basically NFT's niche, as I understand it. Why bother commoditizing the digital space when (according to GenAI acolytes) digital scarcity is going to disappear anyway?
I dunno about NFTs representing real world assets either. It feels like the order is fundamentally lost once that jump to the real world made.
Digital scarcity is an artificial creation of copyright law, bought by people who had a vested interest in porting analog rules over to the new world after the infinitely error-free replicability of digital goods threatened their profit model. If generative AI puts them back in the same quandary, they will simply buy more laws and continue protecting their wealth.
Copyright law has the exact same purpose for digital goods as it did for physical books. Copying books has not really been hard since the 1450s or so. Copyright has always been about maintaining the value of books and other art works in the face of vastly cheaper copying.
The only important difference between physical copyright and digital copyright is the fact that you aren't allowed, in most jurisdictions, to sell on your legally obtained digital copy of something the same way you are for a physical copy. And even this is understandable.
The big problem with copyright is not the existence of it. It's the absurd terms it has gotten to. If copyright maxxed out at, say, 10 years, or even 20, we would live in a much better place than either today or even than a world with no copyright at all.