Thanks for taking the time to put together this viewpoint and sourcing your argument.

I disagree with the comparison to digital art. Computer generated art takes skill, effort, and an artistic eye to succeed. Not just anyone can pick up a stylus or mouse and make good art, though it is a bit more accessible than some traditional mediums.

AI on the other hand requires no effort or skill on behalf of the creator. Furthermore, any artistic style is just mimicry. AI models have scraped real artists work without permission and is being used to slap together plagiaristic content, no accreditation of any kind to the source.

You're conflating ideation with creation.

Critics disliked Van gogh in his time too. And he used all the traditional kit.

Art had a sort of schism once photography took off. Pro-ai art seems to get stuck on one side of it. Traditional art had a long, long run of 'good art' being well composed and skillful reproductions of realism: people, places, events—with a few visual metaphors for spice.

But then came photography. And all those people using art to look back in time had options, cheaper and accessible options. The demand for the skill to make precise replicas nearly collapsed.

What has sustained was not the technical method of making art, but the expressiveness of the artist. The spice becomes the meal. Things become more referential, abstract. It envokes states of mind often contextual to the times and circumstances the art was produced, and drawing on concepts outside of the image itself. It's not just about making pretty pictures from paint, charcoal, or photoshop.

Once you have the dadaists, Duchamps and Pollocks running around, arguments about 'correct' techniques to make art are always going to be shortlived. It's not the advancement of technology that people question. Longish ago most of us collectively decided method didn't really matter, intention did.

If you scrolled through your camera roll would you consider it art? Can you use ai to quickly copy a technique? Yes. Can it be applied critically to success? Maybe. But if you outsource the practical skill and contextual knowledge that makes good, deliberate art, what are the odds that happens?

Walter Benjamin, nearly a century ago now, established a fundamental argument that most cultural critics of today have forgotten or simply gloss over: fascism twists art into a simple aesthetic rather than understanding art as a means to express change in the material conditions of the culture and its people. By relegating more and more to the machine, the machine gives us a false sense of expression without ever actually affecting our own material conditions. We are in the era of mass creation of the simulacra that Jean Baudrillard warned about.