WHO exactly worked hard over a lifetime with no compensation?
He did not get into the profession to make money. He did it out of passion and died poor. Artists are not being tricked by the promise of wealth. You will get a cloned style if you can't afford the real artist making it and if the commission goes to a computer how is that not the same as plagerism by a human? Artists were not being paid well before. The anime industry has proven the endpoint of what happens to artists as a profession despite their skills. Chess still exists despite better play by machines. Art as a commercial medium has always been tainted by outside influences such as government, religion and pedophilia.
In the end, drawing wasn't going to survive in the age of vector art and computers. They are mainly forgettable jpgs you scroll past in a vast array like DeviantArt.
Anyway, my point isn’t that ‘AI is evil and must be stopped’; it’s that it doesn’t feel ‘intellectually empowering’. I (in my personal work) can’t get anything done with ChatGPT that I can’t on my own, and with less frustration. We’ve created machines that can superficially mimic real work, and the world is going bonkers over it. The only magic power these systems have is sheer speed: they can output reams and reams of twaddle in the time it takes me to make a cup of tea. And no doubt those in bullshit jobs are soon going to find out.
My argument might not be what you expect from someone who is sad to see the way artists’ lives are going: if your work is truly capable of being replaced by a large language model or a diffusion model, maybe it wasn’t very original to begin with.
The sad thing is, artists who create genuinely superior work will still lose out because those financially enabling them will think (wrongly) that they can be replaced. And we’ll all be worse off.
You keep going back to value and finances. The less money is in it the better. Art isn't good because it's valuable, unless you were only interested in it commercially.
Of course not; I’m certainly not suggesting so. But I do think money is important because it is what has enabled artists to do what they do. Without any prospect of monetising one’s art, most of us (and I’m not an artist) would be out working in the potato fields, with very little time to develop skills.
Commercial movies have lots of CG, big budgets and famous actors while small budget indie movies have been exploding despire their weaker technical specialities. Noah's ark was made by amateurs while the titanic was made by experts.