Oh the Ai art generator has no "soul" and it's soy and reddit? This precious art form (illustrating things that other people pay you to, a medium dominated almost entirely by furries, porn, and furry porn) is being destroyed by the evil AI? I'm sorry that the democratization of art creation is so upsetting to you. I've brought dozens of ideas to life by typing words into a prompt and I didn't have to pay someone $300 to do so.
I mean I would count the lettering - calligraphy is a thing, isn't it? There's also the matter of illuminations and other marginalia that wouldn't be replicated via the printing press.
A key point for me is that the AI can't draw "whatever they want". It can follow a prompt, but it's never going to perfectly recreate the idea someone has in their head. Sometimes it's hard to even get something remotely similar to your prompt, much less something that matches up with your vision. That makes art aiming to express something specific or make a point hard to do unless you do post processing.
Also, it's not stealing. The AI aims to make something similar to whatever you've provided it with for inspiration. Sure, you could tell it explicitly to modify a work of art - but at that point what's the difference between that and and doing it yourself? The fact that a robot's taking care of it? Why does the level of individual effort put into it matter?
People don't really buy books for calligraphy, so I'm kind of going to ignore that one.
While it's true that current AI are rather inflexible, this is likely only a temporary situation. Much like how the GPT algorithms went from almost entirely incoherent garbage to being able to write original jokes on occasion, AI art will soon evolve to be able to create things to a high degree of specificity and accuracy.
Calling the training data "inspiration" is being a little generous, I would say, given that the end result is entirely based off taking lots of little details from that art. Copying from many sources is still copying. Whereas real life artists use lots of different factors, like their emotions, their perception of the world, how they feel, and the things they see in real life that aren't artistic works (such as natural beauty, for example), to add their original flavor to an art piece, AI artists base their drawings exclusively on the drawings of others. My opinion is that training with an art piece should be something that requires the rights-holders' consent.
100% this. The machine cannot be inspired. It can merely take its inputs (which were given to it without permission) and mash together combinations.
At least with the one I've used you need to provide it with a prompt, so I don't think that's quite true. I suppose you can debate whether a prompt is valid artistic input, but that's splitting hairs in a way that could start to exclude things like photography, which I don't imagine would get much traction