I find it endlessly hilarious that the people (not necessarily you) who railed so hard about people trying to gatekeep what is considered to be art when people were dismissing splatter on a tarp or a banana taped to a wall–who insisted that art can’t be narrowly defined–now suddenly have a narrow definiton of art designed to gatekeep out something that they don’t like.
There is also the problem of using an (apparently) loaded term like “art”. Would there have been the current backlash from some quarters if the term “AI art” hadn’t started being used? If it was popularity called “AI imagery” or “AI illustration” instead? If nothing at all was different except for the word? Would you have people adamantly insisting that “AI imagery isn’t imagery” or “AI illustration isn’t illustration” instead of “AI art isn’t art”? I’ve used the term “Schrodinger’s Art” before–the concept that someone doesn’t know if an image they are looking at is art or not until they are told how it was made.
I ask: how do you define “AI art”? Is it AI images that attempt to reproduce the style of an existing human artist? Because that encompasses only a very small percentage of what people are actually making with AI image generators. More people are using it to illustrate concepts, or generate memes, or make funny or weird stuff. Do all of those things fall within your claim of being an “inherent problem”?
The most prolific forum of AI art (AI imagery? AI illustrations?) I follow is the Cursed AI group on Facebook, with over 800 thousand members and more than a thousand posts a day. Scroll through that if you want a real-world look at a section of the range of purposes people actually use generative AI. Do you assess every image with every goal to be inherently problematic, or just a narrow segment that tries to copy “real art”?