I see. What do you think people seek in art? Why do they engage with it?
Even for pure picture lovers, I will say beyond philosophizing about the creator, the content of the picture itself is subject of thought and analysis as far or as little as one wishes.
People care a bit more about the creator in music, because musicians have built up a lot of image and fake mystique. But then again, for some genres, its much less relevant to people especially those that got grew natively or thrived on the internet eg noise rock, hardcore electronic.
Some of course want deeper analysis, seeing the artists blog/thoughts etc.
Ultimately the actual revealed preference is that most people just want "pretty pictures" and couldn't care much about anything else.
I don't engage with this hobby anymore since the platforms got flooded with AI-generated content. Now, I do like some early and cheeky AI-generated images (mostly pre-ChatGPT), but not after -- and not because of corporate and social politics -- I'm honestly largely out of the news cycle and don't know what terrible or amazing thing some AI company did this week. And yet my hobby completely died and it was strangely disorienting because I struggled to find something else that could replace it, I don't have social media and didn't have feeds except for on those three platforms (I deleted them all now).
I am an outlier from the general population in how I engage with visuals, and I do think that it's likely that all of the commercial visuals in the future will be AI generated, now, I don't think they will be pretty, though. I think they will be largely ugly. I think the majority of people don't actually care about "pretty pictures" at all and are content with very ugly things surrounding them all the time. And the rest can't help it.
I wish time machines existed so we could do blind testing of AI generated art vs purely manual art to people around say 2019.