I'm glad to see tools like Nightshade starting to pop up to protect the real life creativity of artists. I like AI art, but I do feel conflicted about its potential long term effects towards a society that no longer values authentic creativity.
Is the existence of the AI tool not itself a product of authentic creativity? Does eliminating barriers to image generation not facilitate authentic creativity?
No, it facilitates commoditization. Art – real art – is fundamentally a human-to-human transaction. Once everyone can fire perfectly-rendered perfectly-unique pieces of 'art' at each other, it'll just become like the internet is today: filled with extremely low-value noise.
This is the right prediction. Once machines can generate visual art, people will simply stop valuing it. We may see increased interest in other forms of art, e.g., live performance art like theater. It's hard to predict exactly how it'll play out, but once something becomes cheap to produce and widely available, it loses its luster for connoisseurs and then gradually loses its luster for everybody else too.
So then you'll have curation to find the gems in that noise.
But it's still not clear why this is worse than the situation where not everyone can create perfectly-rendered pieces of whatever idea is in their head, and have to rely on others to do it for them, while being limited by what they can afford and what those others are willing to paint.
