As an artist, I think it is a net negative for us. Disregarding the copyright issue, I think it's also consolidating power into large corporations, going to kill learning fundamental skills (rip next generation of artists), and turn the profession into a low skill minimum wage job. Artists that spent years learning and perfecting their skills will be worth nothing and I think it's a pretty depressing future for us. Anways thoughts?
There is a difference. You're a human, not a machine. Don't compare yourself to one. We artists don't compare ourselves to them, either. But you're right in that, to a layperson, AI art seems to evoke the same emotions as human art. But you know why that is? Because AI art is also human art, just remixed by a machine. The problem is that the machine can't tell you its sources because either the programmers didn't care about coding in credits and only took copyrighted artwork in bulk as raw material, or it's very hard for the neural network algorithm to tell you how it came up with an output.
On the topic of inspiration, we as artists love it when other artists are influenced by us. "Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery" as they say. If another artist likes us they're also a fan. That's great. But we're not fond of an AI pretending to be us in front of non-artists, because 1. it's just a program that took our art (without permission) from its database because it was tagged as appropriate, and 2. it doesn't even give us credit. I mean, as far as we know, the programmers who coded the AI didn't even take one look at our art, they just mass downloaded whole websites and our art came along with them. We don't like that.
Edit: Whoever downvoted me, at least refute my points.
I'm an artist. It's my full time job.