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If art as expression is valuable enough then people will spend money to do it for its own sake. If it is not then they were being subsidized the whole time and it was less valuable than we previously thought. I think art will survive but most artists will need to get dayjobs, just like all the people who used to subsidize their art who didn't personally get to experience the expression element. Because that's really the hidden cost that isn't being brought up, the tiny tax on everyone else in society so that artists could be for lack of a better word "unproductive"(undoubtedly they were productive in a pre-ai-art world but they are no longer productive in a post-ai-art world)
Indeed. I suppose that the next step of the defense would be that society persistently undervalues art-as-expression: if the general public were aware of its full value, they would pay for art-as-expression, but structural factors and lack of quantifiable benefits makes awareness implausible in the near future. (Compare this to the animal-welfare activist who fights against factory farmers' greed and consumers' apathy: they believe that if the public were aware of the full value of animal welfare, then animal-protection laws would be passed in a heartbeat.)
In this scenario, the best outcome, short of formal subsidies for artists, would perhaps be a large-scale donation model, much like for many orchestras and museums today. But this is still much less accessible to artists than the pre-AI status quo, where art-as-expression maintains a safe existence as a byproduct of art-as-a-product. So it would still make sense for those who value art-as-expression to lament this change beyond the effects on their own lifestyles, given that this particular Pandora's Box isn't getting closed any time soon.
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