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This is simply the Marxist error of the labor theory of value. The difficulty of producing something raises its value indirectly by reducing its supply, but people do not demand things simply because they're in short supply. A great work of art is not great because of all of the effort that went into producing it; all of the effort that went into producing it was commendable because it had the goal of producing a great work of art. If it worked the other way around, then the most beautiful paintings and statues would pale in comparison to efficiently hiring teams to dig and fill ditches pointlessly.
It's entirely likely that AI will contribute to the end of the world and bring about unprecedented evil, but getting angry at it for making it easier to produce art is fundamentally similar in kind to getting angry at old computers, printers, or any other tools for making it easier to produce art. When people first started making AI art, it was novel and incredible and worthy of applause on that basis alone. Now AI art is very common, and it's rapidly raising the floor for how cheap decent-looking art can look, lowering its value. People feel threatened because if they can't make art that looks better than that, no one will value the labor of traditional artists remotely as much anymore. But their getting angry at that dynamic does not substantially change that dynamic.
There are relative ways said value can be determined. Artificially rigging market conditions is something multinational firms mutually collaborate with one another in doing, and have been for a long time. You see it when Google pays out $X billions each year to Apple to bribe them not to go into the search business. There was a time in industry when the value of aluminum was worth more than gold. The value came from the difficulty of extracting the former relative to the material input costs of extracting the latter.
Maybe artists will shift to becoming programmers and that’ll become the new frontier of artistic elegance and taste. The average person I imagine is completely indifferent to it all and barely notices anything.
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