I've got to be honest, seeing it anywhere unnerves me. Whether it's yet another corporation trying to promote their tech, or whether it's as benign as someone making up an image for something in a video; If it weren't for AI, I think that a lot of these use cases would've been taken up by stock images (free or otherwise), real artists, or even just the creator's best attempt.
I believe it's true that AI will never truly replace humans in art, but it's getting pretty close for comfort. I steer very clear of it and I don't support its usage, because I believe that it was never "necessary" and I struggle to understand how it'd improve the artist's process, even in the best cases, without displacing something else or losing something in doing so. It feels like a flawed solution in search of a problem - artists generally care enough to draw their work in whole, so it'd be difficult to market this to them as something that "improves" the artistic process, since the artistic process is partly why artists create art. Plus, I'd hardly call "paying artists for their work, or improving your own skills" a "problem", but I might be biased.
For tasks that don't involve replacing an artist's work, though, I think AI has its place. For instance, while Photoshop made image editing with computers way easier, machine learning can similarly speed up the process. If you wanted to add an PNG of a person to a different image, you could probably use AI to intergrate it realistically into the background without as much tedium, and it's not like that hurts anyone.
I personally think the discourse on whether it counts as "art" is meaningless. Art has always been entirely subjective; it means very different things to different people. I would personally say it counts as art, but my opinion does not invalidate anyone else's.
There are a lot of legitimate use cases for generative AI, but generating images from a text prompt isn't the most justified one. There seems to be a trend with genuinely useful technology being presented to the public in a way that makes it look reprehensible: Blockchain, cryptocurrency, AI, etc.
I don't think legislation will be necessary to prevent any potential damage caused by generative AI being made available to the public. People should learn to not believe everything they see on the Internet. Before it was AI, it was Photoshop...
The main reason people are calling for legislation is to protect artists from being exploited and being forced out of jobs. Some companies are replacing artists with machines already, and whilst AI models have already been trained on many artists' work (which is questionably ethical to begin with), some are trained with specific artists in mind, for whom it's impossible to compete. These issues impact the livelihoods of real people with no hope of potential recourse, so I think that it's only fair on their part to intervene. Still, I think that a lot of these issues are systematic, and are way beyond the topic of AI here, but in the short term at least I want these people to have the security to continue their careers without the looming threat of a machine that can, in theory, produce thousands of "good enough" images on command with absolutely no human element and nullify their purpose in the eyes of the corporations that formerly employed them.
AI does have some worrying consequences for information, now that hoaxists can come up with a convincing image at the click of a button (not even Photoshop was that easy) to support their agendas regardless of whether it can be verified, so I wouldn't say that the issues on that front are
completely unfounded, in any case.
I don't mean to spread hate or criticise anyone at all with this post, this is a topic that's quite close to me personally that treads in uncertain waters.
