Surely art is about more than impressing you with my investment of effort, though? Otherwise you might as well go watch people working out at the gym as going to a musical production.

I think putting in low effort to make something which previously would have taken effort, is at high risk for producing slop. It tries to use the effort investment signal to suggest that you have something worthwhile to say, but the signal is fake.

But there are also works of low-key brilliance in the world long before AI, stuff that didn't take a lot of effort (and didn't pretend to) but were great anyway.

Slop is just the pejorative, and pejoratives always seize upon the biggest or most obvious weakness, which in the case of these models, IS in fact the quality of the results. But I agree that even if the quality somehow turns out great, the other major (and in my opinion more important) debate to be had is, at what point does technological assistance render the proximal human input irrelevant? And what is even the point of art if there was negligible human input?

Not a fair analogy. It’s all about the effort invested. If I hand AI “write me something funny about my dog” and get the song from that, slop. If I carefully detail my own lyrics and define line by line how I want it rendered, not slop. Unless my lyrics are terrible :)

It’s a tool. The question is how you use it.