watching the AI art debate thing on twitter is a special kind of torture if you’ve ever attempted any irl political action in your entire life because it’s a train wreck of people trying to enact a movement against something and methodically picking every worst possible argument you could hope to make, constantly shifting the battleground from concrete territory you can actually Win into highly subjective areas that nobody in the conversation can ever decisively win
“all AI art is ugly” is a pointless cul de sac you have to re-argue whenever anyone makes even a half-decent picture, “any commercial art AI should have to demonstrate that it’s only working from public domain artworks” is material, practical and doable. “all AI artists have no passion” is a great way to give those people an avenue to argue you’re just being cruel and bitter (or for AI artists who also use traditional mediums to flat-out refute), “any art produced commercially by an AI should have its prompts recorded so we know they didn’t invoke another artist/their IP to make it” is a thing you can make laws and regulations about. “AI art is soulless fake art unlike Real art from Real artists” gives your opponents the easy opportunity to paint you as a backwards out of touch academic snob disconnected from everyday people (and uh, as an academic snob myself, good luck decisively solving the “what is real art??” debate for the first time in human history), “an AI can’t have any kind of conversation with the commissioner to understand their vision, it can’t truly understand what its making so feedback and precision won’t be on par with a real human, so if you want something accurate and personal it could be an inferior service for your money” is a tangible concern that anyone looking to buy art should be aware of, whether or not an AI can make a pretty picture is less important in practical terms than whether it can make the exact picture the person buying wants
you can spend all day arguing that as a human artist you have Soul and that your work has Life, or you can argue that as a human artist if the client wants their fursona’s right arm a little more to the left or for their expression to have more sassiness in it then you can just do that for them instead of arguing with a robot over what an arm is or the complexities of anthro marmoset facial features