[api]

The hard-core heavy-duty hate is all economic.

People are angry about economic issues like low wages and unaffordable real estate but we've been beaten into learned helplessness on those things. Nothing can be done. Both parties are bad. The right promotes corrupt oligarchy and regressively transfers wealth upward, the left prevents new home construction (driving real estate costs) and regulates away everything but service industries and white collar jobs that AI is now replacing.

The worst AI hate I've seen comes from artists and creatives. I've found the AI hate in those communities to be white hot bordering on people talking about violence.

My early take, which I think is still valid, is that actual art is very unlikely to be replaced by AI. AI generated visual stuff looks bland, cliche, or has this weird "plastic" look. AI generated prose is boring. AI generated stories are hilarious barrages of tropes played exactly straight, cliche characters, basically just like paint by numbers bad TV writing or even worse. If real artists find ways to use AI, it won't be this way. It'll be as an assistant or they'll get in and hack it and make it do exactly what they want, much like artistic experimental photography.

But I'm only half right, and when I realized this I understood the hate.

AI is not replacing "true art," and it won't even if true artists end up finding ways to use it (like artistic photography etc.). But what it is replacing is what a lot of artists make their money doing: commercial art, making "content," ghostwriting, first-pass editing, graphic design, web design, that kind of thing.

That's not pour-your-soul-into-it capital-A Art, but it's what pays the bills. AI is absolutely decimating the market for that.

So back to my first point: it's all economic.

[acedia000]

Yes, I strongly agree with these points, but particularly the second half. "Real art" is not at all under threat by AI, which has effectively no ability to even touch, let alone dilute the supposed magnitude and breadth of the human spirit in expression. The existence/proliferation of AI is not going to infringe upon the abilities or opportunities of a bus driver who comes home every day after work to work covertly on an entire house full of sprawling, elaborate tinfoil miniatures which aren't discovered until after his death.

The inconvenient reality of most "creative" work that AI has excelled at supplanting is that it already is, and has been, exactly what people accuse AI to be doing to the form: pure commercial churn, meant solely to occupy temporary space, occasionally brilliant, mostly by accident, but nearly always produced lazily, insincerely, and without pride by people who are not paid enough to care and would rather be working on anything else. AI accelerates human mediocrity not because it is inherently mediocre by nature but because most people, and the things they produce, are. And I very squarely place the bulk of all my own creative efforts and accomplishments within that category too.

[api]

I think "AI is replacing art" is a category error. If I read a book or look at a piece of art or listen to music, the whole point is to receive the thoughts, feelings, and lived experience of a human being.

But yes, AI is supplanting the mundane "art" that artists use as potboiler work, and that is the economic threat. The bitter horrible irony of art as a career is that the best art is often the hardest to sell, and it also takes the most time and energy to make. It's insanely hard to make a living doing just "pure art."