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Notes -
Sadly, Vaush seems to be repeating a lot of arguments I've seen around Tumblr and Twitter about AI art.
He brings up the tired talking point of there being some sort of labor rights issue with feeding a bunch of artists' works into an AI and "stealing" their art in the process. No such labor rights issue exists. If someone is saying this, they fundamentally do not understand what the AI algorithms are doing. Don't get me wrong, there could be other issues with AI art, and we could decide as a society that putting human-generated content into an AI is corrosive to society for other reasons and pass laws limiting that if we wanted to - that's certainly a conversation we could have as a society, but I don't know why people are starting out with a wrong-headed argument right off the bat.
He is also in the "art is a form of communication" camp, which I think tends to be the biggest divide I see in a lot of these debates. Unfortunately, the intellectual groundwork has already been laid for "death of the author" analysis, where the question asked is not "what was the author trying to communicate?", but "what meaning can I as a reader/listener/viewer of an art piece craft from it?"
Borges wrote the short story "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" in 1939, which played with the idea of someone authoring a word-for-word identical rendition of Don Quixote today. In some of the most amusing passages, the exact same paragraph is quoted but given a different analysis based on whether Pierre Menard or Miguel de Cervantes was the author.
I've long been enchanted by the idea of taking a bunch of random books, pretending that they were all written by the same author and then trying to figure out what we can guess about the life of the author based on their literary output. What kind of author would write Winnie the Pooh, Starship Troopers, Call of Cthulhu, Foucault's Pendulum and the Acts of the Apostles? This is an endlessly fun literary exercise that will probably remain fun even after most of the content on our feed is AI generated.
(We've already seen joking stabs at this idea, with people claiming that Hatsune Miku wrote Harry Potter or programmed Minecraft, because they take issue with the original creator.)
I do like art, and I agree it often has communicative value. But "communication" might not even be that far off. AI text generation is also advancing at a considerable rate, even if it might be a while before we see a successor to GPT 3 that can write a whole novel from scratch. Maybe modern AI art is a babbling mishmash of parroted human communication, but in the future we might be able to make pieces that have genuine intentionality behind them even without full AGI. (This also ignores the current arguments about human prompt-makers and curators adding an element of intentionality to AI art.)
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