I believe people are greatly underestimating the potential damage that a proliferation of AI generated art will have on visual expression as a medium. I don't think even the negative voices in this thread see the true potential danger in AI art.

I foresee AI art being the end of this golden age of internet based artist collaboration. And I foresee a future where the only art you will ever see in your day to day life or anywhere on the internet is AI generated. I foresee a future where even those with the dedication and talent to try to learn to create visual art will find their resources greatly limited and no community to participate in. And I foresee a future where the hard core of remaining human-hand artists are closed off, bitter, and unwelcoming to the rest of the world.

Those who defend AI art generators say that they are no different than other tools that help artists, that the human still participates creatively. I'm not here to argue whether or not this is true, but what participation the human has is not visual art. It is, at a fundamental level, creative/technical writing. There is artistry to be found in this medium, but it lacks some of the core features that make visual art an evolving and collaborative process.

Visual artists do not render a scene or paint a painting pixel by pixel. At least not after you get out of the age of finger painting. The most elementary lessons of anyone who pursues visual art are how to deconstruct the image in your brain, and then how to build that image onto the paper. Not pixel by pixel, but by the rules of construction, anatomy, skeletons, perspective. Through these lessons the artist understands how to build a 2D image out of 3D space. The AI knows none of this, and the person prompting the AI learns none of this either.

But it goes deeper than this. Any artist that starts out will inevitably take inspiration in their "Style" from other artists around them. Having the ability to construct a scene is one thing, but applying colour, linework, shading, texture onto your framework takes knowledge and thoughtful direction. Those defending AI say that AI is doing the same as new artists, learning by example. But growing artists do something AI does not. By learning the techniques of those who came before them and emulating their styles, new artists nearly inevitably alter or experiment with those techniques to create a personal style. Something unique to that artist that makes their contribution to the art world special and personal. Every new artist that joins the community to learn eventually gives back by inspiring others with the unique techniques that they themselves pioneered. AI cannot do that. And while the AI prompter may learn tricks or keywords that produce results they like, they cannot describe a new brush technique to an AI without actually understanding what a brush can or cannot do. (even if the AI knew what a brush was)

In this way, AI on its own cannot evolve or grow. Prompters will undoubtedly be able to keep producing unique and interesting looking art, and what becomes popular with society or a community dedicated to it may change, but the art of building an image and the unique contributions that artists make to the medium will be lost. Art has always evolved and improved as artists learned from the techniques of those who came before them, and adapting what they learn to their tools, their interests and contributing back something new. Tools enable artists to make art more easily, but no artist should need any tool. If you hand an artist a blank wall and a bottle of ketchup and say "make a cat", they will still be able to make something you can recognize as a cat. And if you gave them a week to work on their ketchup skills they might get really good at it. If you take the AI generator away from a prompter, they cannot do anything. They have the image in their head, but without the specific tool they require, all they can do is describe it to you in words. Maybe beautiful words, maybe words that would make an amazing poem or story. But only words. If you can't do it without the tool, you can't do it.

Learning to be a visual artist, the kind who can improvise with ketchup, takes a very, very long time for a human being to do. It takes serious dedication, passion, and a desire to share the images in their head with the world. And no matter how much you want to do it, or what resources you have available, you will ALWAYS start off terrible at it. To get past being terrible and into making your own style and thus contributing back to the ecosystem takes a lot of effort. Prior to the advent of AI art, the only way to put a picture in your head into the real world (other than commissioning another human being to do it) was to do it yourself with your hands and whatever medium you liked working in. This motivated a lot of young artists to learn the skill simply because there was no other option. With the advent of AI, fledgling creators looking to draw their Sonic the Hedgehog Self Insert or their DnD Warlock or sassy cartoon hamburger cartoon could either spend half an hour producing something terrible while learning from the experience, or they could type "pink bat in the style of sonic the hedgehog with six arms" into an AI prompt and get 50 images looking like they came straight from Sega Studios in ten seconds. Great for your sonic RP Discord server, not so much for learning to draw. Many young artists will simply seek the instant gratification of AI generated art rather than learn to draw themselves.

Another thing that will discourage people from learning to draw is that there will simply be any potential jobs where producing artistic digital assets pays money. Nobody will pay an artist for slow hand crafted art when AI art is quick and free. The hand-crated art may be more appealing to some, but "quick" and "free" are extremely hard words for corporations to resist. Many artists in the industry are already losing their careers as they're forced out by AI replacements. With no visual art related jobs in the modern world, nobody will pursue learning to draw as a career choice. Jobs in visual design will be about wrangling AI prompts. And again, neither the AI or the Prompter is actually learning anything about constructing images, and neither is contributing back to the evolution of art.

This will lead to another problem, the drastic reduction in tools or instructional courses in how to draw or paint. With few children inspired to draw, and nobody wanting to make a career out of drawing, the only people who will pursue advanced learning in drawing or painting will be those independently wealthy enough to do so. Services will be fewer and far between, and far more expensive as the niche market pays top dollar for them. Drawing and painting will become something only the rich have access to and there will not be any free resources, because in the end game...

There will be no hand-crafted art anywhere on the internet. In a hypothetical future where AI art is quick and free, the only advantage a human has in this environment is the ability to work 50 years at it and create a unique style that the AI has not yet learned to replicate. However, in order to preserve that advantage, the artist must NEVER allow their art to be seen by an AI image scraper. If a scraper can get enough samples of their art, the AI will be able to learn the nuances and in seconds, destroy what value the human artist has earned. As such, no human who wants to be valued at drawing will ever put their art on the internet. The rich people who can afford the elite instruction in the decaying institutions will create a private clique insulated from the rest of the world where art can only be viewed in person without cameras present. Even those looking to hire real artists to create digital assets will not find any people willing to take the jobs offered. Every piece of artwork you as an average person will see on a day to day basis will be AI generated, by people who do not actually understand how to draw or paint without the AI generator. But it only gets worse from here.

With few new artists in newer generations, and those artists STRONGLY incentivised to never let you actually see their art outside of galleries and museums, the AI generators will have no new material to add to their scrapers other than more AI generated images. AI will feed off itself and wind deeper and deeper into mediocrity. Even the human prompters who are making the most earnest efforts to be creative and twist something unique out of the AI generators will be at a distinct disadvantage because the only thing in their world to get inspired by is more AI generated art, actually muddling their imagination.

This is the future of unregulated AI art. A small, insulated elite community of people who keep knowledge, originality and growth to themselves and a world where a single tool generates every picture you ever see and there are no people left who can function without it.

Edit: If you've actually managed to read through this wall of text, I commend you. I apologize for the rant. This has been stewing in my head all last night and at work today as I was reading the comments in other sections of people basically laughing at artists for having wasted their lives learning to draw. It really hurt. I needed to express that this utopia of free art they're imagining isn't nearly as wonderful as they think it is.

And yes, it hurts a lot that the skill I've been working on for 30 years and the only chance I had to leave something in this world I could be proud of is now just something to be laughed at by people who think I'm dumb for wasting my time.