There is a new brand of discourse gaining shape: people who hate super hard on AI generated art - honestly it reaks of insecurity - but what annoys me more are the neolibtardish arguments that are getting thrown into the mix. Copyright is NOT our friend... What's the endgame here want to claim ownership on something that's not even made yet? You want to patent a style?! Yeah sheesh great idea wait until the corpo overlords have a go at this one.
Here's is the based take on intellectual property: Publishing a work in progress without consent would amount to a severe breach of privacy, but my sweet summerchild, the nanosecond you publish something to the world it is not your's anymore, it belongs to our collective history and the conscience of anybody who got to perceive it. That's kinda the whole fucking point, rejoice in every impression, or don't and destroy them all, something will still persist. I get that people have to sustain their livelyhoods, but it's not like that doesn't apply to anybody who isn't an artist too, there is no law of nature that says people should be able to sustain themselves with the thing they prefer doing, or the thing they most excel at. There are things that could be done to amend such problems to give each their own, not everybody can hope to be drowning in success like toady, rightfully so I might add, but there simply isn't enough time in the century to give everybody their stagetime so to say, besides not everybody could manifest their genius in an obvious way given such an opportunity... So giving "their" legal arguments credibility (whomever "they" might be) is such a bad move, these people would lock the entire culture in cryogenic state only to extort a buck, the insane amount of control that gives them is just a free bonus on top, but the following chessmoves are little fucking more dystopic than not having access to all episodes of your favourite TV show.
I've had a few artistic endeavours on my own, and I accepted long ago that I am not owed anything, but rather that's it's an immense priviledge to be able to access those means of expression. The economy is fucked no doubt, but to me that is an allmost entirely separate issue.
I think people will get quite good at telling what's AI made and what's not, as AI progresses so will we, fads will come and go, and if it takes skill to stay ahead of the others, well there crumbles your whole merit based argument doesn't it?
Stuff will allways organize itself along a quality bell curve, it's not a question of merit, but a simple necessity of classification. The sum total of art increasing must allways be considered a win, but the real win here is more accessibility to means of expression. To argue against that most likely equals to overestimating your own importance in our cosmic voyage.