> I also think “AI art” can be harmful to artists and more often than not produces uninteresting flawed garbage at an unacceptable energy cost.
That is where opinions actually diverge between pro-AI and anti-AI clusters - they look gorgeous and human-indistinguishable if you aren't trained with tons of images, or extremely disturbing and obvious if you were. It's like how CGIs and special effects from the past would look terrible today.
The big genAI flamewar actually has very little do with copyright or would-be-lost jobs. It's mostly about quality and emotions encoded in the images(deep rage). Lots of tech inclined miss this point.