It reminds me of one of my dad's favorite dad jokes: "While you're up go to the bathroom for me." It's tough to delegate the catharsis of writing.
And the industry is gone. No one could produce figurines like that at any worldly price, probably for the last 100 years. The world is less for it, but it doesn’t matter, art follows different more efficient technologies and methods.
I sympathize with these artisans of the written word. But they’re all wrong, they’re dinosaurs who don’t know it. I myself was one, churning on high-value bespoke written work. The economic model is wrong, we’re the expert 1850s figurine crafters, adapt or … burn out I guess.
In Taiwan I've met indigenous woodworking artists. They sell stuff in markets all the time, plenty of it incredibly intricate. Incidentally, many temples here are also covered in beautifully layered granite carvings.
Art for its own sake. Say something. Experience having said something.
Economic value is the least of it. i get why economic value is the only thing that matters. we made the world this way. i get it.
but also: art for its own sake. say something. experience the saying of the something.
[1]: https://www.inprnt.com/gallery/canadianturtle/pacman-ukiyoe/
If you are talking about the background colour of a slide, that is not "art", it's a simple choice.
The portrait for your d&d character - if you used AI to generate just because you need any image and you don't care, you need a representation, then it may be difficult to classify that as "art". If you drew it, regardless of how bad it is, and you like and appreciate and connect with it, that is "art".
Of course, we may all have our own definitions of "art"
The existence of a sea of AI slop making it impossible to find or publicize writing is what will kill it.
It's purely a loss.
We've had LLMs for years. Image models and coding agents have gotten remarkably good, and their output is all over the place. So where is the AI writing? Outside of automated summaries, formulaic essays, and overly verbose LinkedIn posts, nowhere.
What will actually happen, likely, is a complete death of writing. Not just that the craft is gone, but that art is gone.
What is the point of creating anything if it has no meaning? And likewise, there is no economic value to it either.
So there will simply be no art, and paradoxically any true art will simply be so ridiculously expensive and unaffordable that nearly nobody will benefit from it any more...
Writing is also peculiar in that it is easily referenceable with a deep history, so it serves as a way to compare one's own ideas to others. Memes are similar in principle, but tend towards esotericism and ephemerality in a balkanized internet.