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Art has a functional component of looking nice or representing something, and the social component of representing the author or a time period. The vast majority of art in the world is aiming to do well at the former, while only a tiny percentage of high art is for the latter and ends up as museum pieces or in private collections. Oh, and there's the "my friend/child/GF made this".
If there could be a clean split in the conversation between one component and the other, then I think things would be mostly fine. But anti-AI advocates really really want to try to convince you that AI is utterly inferior at the functional component when this is just demonstrably not true. Then when another round of evidence comes up that, no really, most people can't tell the difference, the conversation shifts motte-and-bailey style to "oh the problem is AI art doesn't have the social meaning", which is true in a small sense, but then they again try to imply that means all AI art is garbage. So there's a nugget of truth in that argument, but it's almost always presented in a bad-faith way.
You're living in a bubble if you think even close to "everyone" hates AI art. What I've seen is that most of the political spectrum has people who DGAF along with many loud complainers that AI art is evil. So you can find people opposed to AI art basically anywhere, although it's clearly not universal. But on the far-left specifically (mostly the woke Bluesky types) the opposition to AI art is monolithic.
I have heard this a lot, but I would hold, I think, that even though you can find edge case exceptions if you stack the deck a bit, most AI 'art' has a very noticeable, identifiable style? And that style tends to be both repetitive and cheap? Maybe you can avoid that if you can spend hours slaving away over prompts, but that is quite rare.
At least part of the conversation is about status, right? AI art is perceived as cheap and nasty. Like the microwave, it might be useful, but it's also fundamentally low-class, because using it signifies that you could not afford a real human artist.
Obviously 'everyone' is hyperbole and I do not mean every single person, since there are people here who like it. There are a handful of people like Scott Alexander who defend it. Still, as far as I can tell it's genuinely unpopular? Searching for polls, well, I'll spare you all the results from artists themselves or from art galleries (both those groups passionately, overwhelmingly, hate AI art), but as far as I can tell, ordinary people feel less positive toward AI in art that they do in other fields. This seems consistent with the generally skeptical if not outright negative view of AI most people have (and the Pew poll is just Americans, who are one of the most pro-AI national groupings). Here there is apparently widespread opposition to AI music.
In general, I think my hot take on AI is that this is the most hated major technological innovation in my lifetime, and I don't think I can really overstate it. There are very enthusiastic AI boosters on the internet, but as far as I can tell in the real world, people are mostly either ignorant of AI, or they dislike it to various degrees of intensity.
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