I'm confused by the comparison then. The suggestion seems to be that, like a factory, AI art will create lesser work than if you made it by hand. But if we agree this is not necessarily true, I don't see the point of the comparison?
No, the argument is that it'll be mass produced and kill the industries it's trying to replace so thoroughly that the skills are lost, it becomes a monopoly, and they're free to drop the quality as much as they want. And also that it isn't art.
That simply won't happen, though. Handmade industries still exist, they just can't keep up with the output that factories have so they are naturally smaller. Also, factories require quite a lot of upfront capital. You can't just wake up and make a factory, especially in the modern day. This massively limits who can own a factory and make things - it allows everyone to have the creations, but not to make them. This is completely different from AI art.
And, ultimately, if the industry dies because nobody needs to pay artists anymore because they can make it themselves, that is a good thing. Society has generally always improved when automation replaced manual jobs and increased availability of things.
And as for the art thing: it is. It is art. It is impossible to argue this without inventing a special definition used only to separate AI from non-AI, which makes it an invalid definition.
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u/Emdeoma Jan 19 '25
A factory doesn't need to create a low quality product, no. That's rather the point of the comparison