Observe firstly: the seemingly-now worthless Online Artist who already was worthless before AI came knocking his door down. It is not AI that demoted his value but the magnitude of artists alongside him competing for half a second of audience time and perhaps if they're lucky, a retweet. Over saturation of art, images, and the average time anyone evensomuchascares about it, even less seeks it out given it's supposed to be fed, assuming the image managed to get on a good spoon that day, if not maybe reposted 2 or 3 more times at peak hours for another cheap glance, before an ad is given more attention. Everyone wants to follow their dream, so artists continue to multiply, they quickly learn to monetize these drawings no matter the skill level, because the competition is vast and something has to possibly make up the time and support the Big Dream to work at an animation studio. But there's so many images to compete with the artist's contribution is essentially empty.
Despite being mere spit in the sea of oversaturation, the artist has the right to be infuriated by AI essentially copy and pasting his work, and making the hands appear mangled in it's chewed up and spit out version of his style. In some sense he should also feel relieved by this and realize this may be the key out of stagnation and cheap appeal of images that is plagueing him and his peers. 1000's more shitty images are thrown into the sea.
AI doesn't innovate, it merely copies what exists into a cheap bastardization, tho arguably humans do this more and more in their creations as well, the sea of oversaturation doesn't exactly encourage individuality, just false pretenses of it. We've heard it all before: The medium is the message (Marshall McLuhan.) Mass production of digital mediums- image, video, text- prepares us all for the onslaught of these formats produced by AI cheaper than any Chinese fast fashion assembly line. Now it's not just the special cereal box boys swarming to the AI titties, it's Mr. Kellog himself. It's the culture makers who have bought up all the culture and are selling it at a profit, they can make quadrouple the culture--- based on what?
That's the thing tho. U don't have to buy it. Everything AI replaces becomes tenfold the artform it originally was. Fancy that, this array of digital media trained us for the arrival of a world that uses AI. As the evolution of technology substantially increases, a successor to AI is inevitable. In this sense, what new environment is AI psychically preparing us for?