If you ask me, it is a photograph that is cheap.
Of course it is. Quite literally. But the task in context was to have an acurate picture. If your task is to have a hand crafted unique piece done by a known artist ... well, there are famous photographers as well. Showing that the real Art is just application of skill. While both make images, they use different skillsets. An AI Artist, as in, someone who uses an AI tool to create stuff, would use a different skillset as well. And of course there are the evil cheaters that use the imagination of a reader to paint pictures, just by using words (yes, that was a joke, but the point stands, that even this is just another skillset to create pictures in the mind of the observer)
This is the typical strawman you get when you falsely call AI “just a tool”. It’s like saying a tiger is “just a cat”.
You should maybe look up, what a strawman is. The tiger is a cat fallacy only works if you want to treat a tiger like a cat because of some shared trait, that is not relevant for the discussion at hand. And that is not even a strawman, that is a false equivalency. Oh, and if the discussion at hand is about what they both have in common, like traits of felidae, it is not even a fallacy.
The AI discussion is the conflict of individual (traditional) work vs. mass production (with advanced tech). Should we condem it or should we embrace it, and why. If condemnation, why did we not condem other forms of mass production. If we embrace it, should there be constraints, other mass productions do not have. In the evolution of picture creation it is not the first tech jump. And no, there were times when painting a picture was not something anyone could do. You would not even have the colors to do so. Mixing paint was a trade secret. A few hundred years later, everyone can post a perfect picture on the net. In seconds. No hand mixed colors needed, no years long training, no canvas, just a button press and an activated filter or three. You can even order your picture printed on canvas and hang it on your wall.
You might be able to flesh out the not just a mere tool argument. That somehow this tech jump is so much different from other advances. Because on the outside it sure looks quite similar. Something previously hard to do and only with special training and experience is now available to the untrained to do for a fraction of the price.
And I even think, that some uses of AI should be forbidden. But even there, that would be bascially stuff that is forbidden for human artists as well. See the tracing vs. "reference material" discussions. Artists copy from each other without consent quite often and there is a thin line everyone has a different opion about, what is ok and what is not ok.
The jump between paper and digital is far greater than between digital and AI-based.
So? A difference in quantity changes the quality? I was being overly sarcastic, should you not have noticed.
Funny how you call art mindless
Funny how you try to misrepresent my points. That is an actual strawman, by the way. No, I did not call art mindless. Let me rephrase it, so you might understand it better. I said, if your actual job of "art" is to mindlessly creating the same pictures in different angles, that you will lose your job to a robot. As an example, the people drawing animation in the older animation movies. There were people drawing and animating each frame. They had an artist drawing the key frames and other artists drawing the in-between frames.
the other is based on greed and the desire to pump out meritless crap as quickly as possible
Are you talking about chinese sweatshops now, where they paint on canvas? Yes, that is a thing.
There is nothing good about Star Trek’s world.
Oh boy. That's a good one. Did I say StarTrek is good or interesting? No. Does it matter to the discussion? No.
What did matter, was the portraial of a working AI and how far away we currently are from that. What can currently be replaced with AI is stuff that is more on the mechanical and not the creative side of "Art".