There was a legitimate use case in art to draw on generative AI for concepts and a stopgap for smaller tasks that don’t need to be perfect. While art is art, not every designer out there is putting work out for a gallery - sometimes it’s just an ad for a burger.

However, as time has gone on for the industry to react I think that the business reality of generative AI currently puts it out of reach as a useful tool for artists. Profit hungry people in charge will always look to cut corners and will lack the nuance of context that a worker would have when deciding when or not to use AI in the work.

But you could provide this argument about any tool given how fucked up capitalism is. So I guess that my 2c - generative AI is a promising tool but capitalism prevents it from being truly useful anytime soon.

One of my ex employers sold a construction company a six figure “building logistics system” which was just a Microsoft Access file. And the construction dudes had to use a CDMA dongle to remote desktop into a mainframe to open their access files. A travesty.