Some of us value authenticity. Plagiarism-powered hallucination engines have exactly none of that. The disturbed individual (or individuals) that painted the bathroom of my primary school with feces created something more artful than any AI slop could ever be.

No ethical consumption under capitalism doesn't apply to "luxury" goods like art and entertainment. That's like arguing that it's okay for people to still use Reddit and Twitter after all the stuff from the past few years because "no ethical consumption under capitalism." This isn't Amazon or Wal-Mart killing off local businesses so that they're the only place you can find stuff that we're talking about. This is not reading Harry Potter or buying merch because JK Rowling is a TERF. It's super easy to avoid companies like that, I do it all the time. I stopped using streaming services (and TV before that), and there's easily a dozen video game companies that I refuse to buy from due to the way they treat their employees and customers. And protect sexual assault. Let's not forget that Ubisoft and Blizzard both are guilty of that.

This isn't about people making art with digital tools. I do that all the time, and AI gen can easily be a super cool tool for that. Except for the whole stolen labor part of it and people using it to do a corporation while using excuses like "no ethical consumption" to absolve themselves of stealing the skills and work of artists.

Creating art is considered a useless skill looked upon with contempt by society, yet the product is highly coveted, and AI is being used by people who want the reward but don't want to put in the effort and don't want to pay those who can put in the effort fair compensation for their work. It's merely another step in the long road of devaluing artists.

Lapis lazuli? Maybe not, but lithium mines are a constant source of criticism for those reasons, and your simplification of the world to an either or scenario is incredibly disingenuous.

If you think that people like Da Vinci and Michaelangelo had nothing to say, then you know nothing about artists. Da Vinci hated the Pope who commissioned the Sistine Chapel so much that he painted him burning in Hell directly behind the altar. He was a gay man who had relationships with his apprentices and performed illegal autopsies on bodies to study the human anatomy during a time when it was considered descecrating the dead, which formed the foundation of modern medicine's understanding of the human body.

You're just making excuses so you feel better about stealing the labor of others.

AI bros fall into 2 categories in my experience, the "who cares, picture making machine go brrr" group and the "I can make works that rival the great artists like Da Vinci with just a few words, thus making me the winner and better than any so-called artist" group.

As for your argument about artists doing the same thing all the time, there's a fundamental difference between artists and AI: a person learns the rules/reasons behind something while AI merely generates a statistical average. An AI is incapable of understanding concepts like perspective and lighting, nor can it learn anatomy. It's much closer to tracing art than it is to going "I really like the way that guy does hands, I'm gonna learn to do that." If you write a haiku, you're not stealing your poem from other writers. You know the rules that make a poem a haiku. But an AI, asked to write a haiku, doesn't know what makes a haiku a haiku, it just knows that its statistics say that x number of syllables is followed by a line break, etc.

If artists can't exist without having artists to train on, then where did the first artist come from? Where did Impressionism come from? It hasn't always existed as an art form. Who created the art that the Mona Lisa was generated from? I can tell you: the actual person that Da Vinci was drawing and the years upon years of study of things like anatomy and lighting that he had. The cavemen who drew stick figure horses on cave walls didn't train on other stick figures, they drew what they saw in nature through the lense of their own interpretation and creativity.

Nobody can steal another person's skills.

Look at your own words here: Nobody. No person. AI isn't a person stealing the skills of another, it's a tool using patterns and schematics created by people to make knockoffs. And just because this is a problem of capitalism stealing from workers doesn't mean that it's not a problem that we should address.

Again this is a direct result of the exploitation of worker by capital. There is nothing inherently exploitative about making art on a computer (apart from the manufacturing of the computer which is extremely exploitative).

This is what I'm saying. Making art using digital tools? Totally fine, I do it myself and even have a side business from the stuff I make in Blender. Using the tools created by companies committing wage theft rather than paying artists a living wage because it's cheaper and easier for you? Not okay. It's like buying stuff from Temu. You don't have to subscribe to Netflix and watch all the latest shows. You don't have to use Stable Diffusion to make memes any more than you have to use Reddit.

If 2 things were to change, nobody except for the stupid "photography will kill painting" people would care: people using AI to avoid paying people a living wage, and people who think that using AI makes them better than others.

Both fill the world with shit.