So hear me out... I think AI could be financially very helpful to artists, while giving them a chance to do more meaningful work. Businesses buy a ton of stock photos, graphics and art. An artist could create a library of original digital pieces (they probably already have it) and use that for the source of new AI generated digital content, which in turn would go back into the source library. This reduces the cost/time associated with soulless stock/business content, but positions the artist to maintain a revenue stream. With the extra time, the artist could work on their preferred pieces or be commissioned to do one-offs.

I have a 1 hour video from a digital artist/ programmer that will tell you essentially why it being lifeless matters.

Essentialy, everything before AI was either of mechanistic natural beauty, derived from biological chemical, physical processes, like the leaf of a plant the winding of rivers the shape of mountains etc. ,or it was made by human desicions, there was intentionality thought and perseverance behind every sentence you read, every object you held or owned, every depiction you would look at.

And this made the thing made by humanity inherently understandable as a result of human descion making, creativity, you might not agree with the causes and the outcomes of those decisions, but there was something there to retrace, and this retracing this understanding, made it beautifull, unique or interesting.

Same with the natural objects and phenomenon, you could retrace their existence to causes, causes that unfold a world in their own right, leading you to ask questions about their existence, their creation, their process.

In this retracing, these real links to people, to land and to nature lies the real beauty. The life so to say is them being part of this network for you to take a peek into, through their art, their creation, their mere existence.

Now we have a third category a thing or text or image that exists solely because an imitation machine, an AI is able to crate it, and it can fulfill some profit motive, there is no thought and no intentionality behind this writing this art and so on, it's a result of statistical models which are built on what existed in the real world, and robs most if not all of these building blocks by just existing. It fills their place, it takes the energy they needed, the intelligence and decision-making they can create, and uses it to replace them, gradually over time.

And it doesn't really give back, it doesn't create value in the sense that we can retrace and understand what it makes, it's a statistical result, there are no causes to peek into besides pretty boring math, and a collection of data it was trained on, a collection so big and varied that looking at it's entirety might as well just be looking at everything, it tells us nothing, it doesn't lead us to ask what there is behind it in the same way.

https://youtu.be/-opBifFfsMY?si=0yD3BmZSF9ijfGIE

I think as long as all the training data and the results are public and free to use and modify there is no moral problem beyond artist livelihood which is sad but just a part of life. Jobs have come and gone for as long as humans exist, its something we have to accept long term.

So far artists themselves are still very good at catching even high quality AI pictures tho. AI models produce something that only looks like human art on the surface, but it still misses lots of things. In many cases it wont replace existing art because often the human and the story behind art is what makes people appreciate it.