Like all automation, it would be cool if it didn't mean workers were staring down the barrel of capitol's gun. I love the cool art machine learning models can generate. Would be even cooler if we lived in a world where this didn't threaten anybody and couldn't be used as a cudjol.
We can make a world where this is the case. Suck my guts (girl nuts) for more objectively correct takes you slop hogs.
I agree that humans take inspiration from each other all the time in regards to art and I think that is a great and healthy thing.
The primary difference (and the difference between this being art/notart imo) is that humans bring their own experiences into the art. These machines cannot do that. The only thing AI art does is pull in art work, add it to the pile of referenced things, and create pictures from that.
We all agree that when one human directly copies another's artwork without adding anything to it, they are a hack. These machines explicitely cannot add anything to the art than what is input. Humans all have unique experiences and beliefs to draw from. AI art does not have it.
That's how I see the whole situation, at least.
Except people also produce vapid and derivative art that's strictly aesthetic or utilitarian in its purpose. The art-generating AI even works in a similar fundamental way to how humans do, being a neural network that recombines observed patterns to synthesize something new-but-derivative.
Even the limits of its training data are more a matter of scale than of its nature: when it gets to a point where the neural network is twice as big and being fed movies along with their screenplays and mountains of novels in a way that start to create a further layer of context and understanding, then what differentiates the AI from a human raised on that same media? Is there an actual innate spark to humans or is it just that we're currently unique in our scale and sophistication? When the output of an AI is being guided, curated, and edited by a human how is that distinct from the creation of media now, apart from removing the need for specific technical skills?