First:
A significant portion of art appreciation is parasocial. We are touched by relatable art because we feel less alone knowing someone else experienced what we did, or deeply understood and empathized with someone just like us. We are impressed with virtuosity because it pushes the boundaries of human potential. The artist themself is part of what we enjoy about the artwork.
The obsession with celebrity and “the artistic genius,” is part of the social value of art. Oppenheimer and Barbie are valuable, and interviews and profiles of the Greta Gerwig or Cillian Murphy are also valuable outputs of the artistic world. The empathic experience of deeply exploring a singular artist’s body of work has value that AI art can never emulate.
When the arts educator Eric Booth taught at Juilliard, he told all his classes, “your job as a musician is to be radiant with the joy of a life in music.” To be a jaded or cynical artist is to fail to fulfill your social purpose - others are relying on artists to remind them how beautiful the world is.
No matter how good AI “art” gets, it will never fulfill the social purpose of artists.
Second:
Despite the fact that AI art will never serve the social function of real art, it will absolutely produce usable images and audio for utilitarian uses. Lots of people who dedicate years of life to honing their craft for the purposes of making art go on to make their actual living making advertisements or vapid entertainment or the like. If these more utilitarian purposes of artistic craft are swallowed by AI, then the risk profile of pursuing a career as an artist becomes even more of a suicide mission.
Arts are currently a field that can offer significant socio-economic mobility, at great risk of failure. The money is wildly variable, but even as a humble middle class artist, the social mobility is significant. Social acculturation into the upper tier of any artistic field is also inherently an education in wealth, manners, and class dynamics. This education comes both from one’s fellow artists from more wealthy backgrounds, and from the patron class.
Crappy little arts gigs (drawing nerdy fan-art commissions, writing and recording intro music for a low-production-value podcast, illustrating a header image for a magazine article) can keep young artists afloat while they hone their craft and realize their potential. Without these gigs, and without the safety net of more utilitarian career paths that use the craft of artists, this door of socio-economic mobility is closed. An all-or-nothing world without these gigs and fallback options will squeeze the aspirational class out of the arts, leaving only the children of the aristocracy.
An artistic monoculture of rich kids would be far worse than what we have today. The fact that the artistic world (from arts schools on up to the upper echelons of the field) is a melange of people from all kinds of class backgrounds informs so much cross-pollination of different ways of thinking that makes our culture richer. Human artists and human-made art will always persist, but the proliferation of AI “art” will only serve to make the output of human artists less enriching than it otherwise could be.
"A significant portion of art appreciation is parasocial. We are touched by relatable art because we feel less alone knowing someone else experienced what we did, or deeply understood and empathized with someone just like us. We are impressed with virtuosity because it pushes the boundaries of human potential."
No it isn't. I am touched by relatable art because it relates to me. I am impressed with virtuosity because it is good. Art that requires critics to first develop a parasocial relationship with the artist in order to be appreciated, is art that cannot stand on its own merits.