Art is for everyone and everyone can have an opinion on it. Dont be so elitist.
It may not for you, but obviously it does impact lots of artists ability to make a living off their art, to find community in their art, and on a longer time scale it could even change how society values art.
The big issue here is that through all of human history, effort was a necessary prerequisite to making art. Whether that effort came from mixing paint together before sitting down in front of an easel, hiking through the back country to find the perfect spot for a photograph, or fixing n-gons in Blender all evening. If you created a piece of art, there was a shared understanding amongst other artists that you cared enough to put in the work to make something. For most artists, it's the work/journey/process they cherish, not just the end goal. Putting in the work to make your art is usually the only "gatekeeping" that happens in the art community.
But AI is allowing people to short circuit the path from idea -> creation, which begs the question: is that actually creating? Is prompting for a picture substantially any different than tweaking your search on Google images until you find a photo that resembles what you had in mind? Is creating just having a shiny new picture, or is it the hours/weeks/months of effort, failure, and successes that happened leading up to the picture?
Point is: you can call it "gatekeeping" if you want, but all we're really saying is that creation != ideation.
I don't believe they are. Searching and prompting are far more akin to a customer asking their artist to tweak the commission.
Of course the commissioned artist is creative too, and the artists AIs are trained on are creative, and the artists who made the engravings that Max Ernst cut up for his collages were also creative. Creativity everywhere. Even Microsoft employees are creative sometimes, I believe, even when at work.
I guess your point is that we now have the option to produce uncreative slop, which is true and annoying.
Where this becomes even more of an issue is imagine somebody spends substantial time with these tools to create something - editing the output of vid models for example. Some would say that's not art but at the end of the day it is just using a tool.
Subjectivity is not a shield that protects a work from criticism, and disliking a piece of art does not necessarily mean you are closed minded. It could simply be that you don't find it interesting, or that you find the values of the artist reprehensible, or that you find it overly derivative, etc.
They're buying it from the AI. They haven't produced anything new.
Well, your analogy assumes people consume art and food for the same reasons. Does the desire to experiencing a new piece of art come from the same place that makes you crave for a slice of pizza?
Of course not.
Another disconnect I often see in these discussions is that there seems to be a misunderstanding about what most artists conceive as "creating art." "Creating art" is not primarily about consuming or satiating some part of our brains. To use your analogy, we're not baking pizzas purely because we wish to eat them, but because we value the process of baking the pizza itself!
When artists have these sorts of conversations with people, it tends to turn into frustrating arguments due to this misunderstanding. When I question whether you're "creating" art, its not me trying to scold you and others who like to ask AI to generate a pictures you thought up. It's that I'm seeing people misinterpret the end result of creation with the act of creation itself.
Again, for artists these are two separate things!
By the way, you do realise I am an artist dont you? I think that proves that everything you are saying is false, because here we have two artists disagreeing on what artists think!
I also said "most artists" not "all artists". I'm not terribly surprised that a poster on Hacker News tends to think differently than most artists, seeing as this community tends to attract the sort of person who is pro-AI.
For me, it's not about invalidating others opinions. In the same way I hold my doctors opinions of my health in higher regard than a random person on the internet, I hold the opinions creatives/artists/etc. on the subject of creation in higher regard than people who use generative AI.
So you can have your opinions, but it's not "elitism" for those of us who actually have experience doing a thing to state our opinions as well.
In no way can you trust someone to know more about the beauty of art than you do, because nobody else has any idea of what you yourself consider beautiful art.