I think there is a real trap of not caring about the side to the product that you didn’t create. I fell for this trap. I made music, used AI for cover art way before this conversation was happening and people were mad about data centers and all that, years ago now. People were mad that art was used to train it without their permission but the novelty of the thing was the loudest voice at the time.

Later I realized that AI cheapens your entire product, whatever it is. If I use AI for the cover art, people will think I used AI for the music (I didn’t). I went back and did the art myself for everything I could to eliminate as much AI bullshit from my music, just so it wasn’t giving people the wrong idea.

I think everyone is realizing this, AI just makes everything else look like slop. It’s not a “neat” tool anymore. The novelty has been dead for at least a year. No one gives a fuck that you can generate Spiderman as ancient Japanese scroll art. Now it’s just, “oh god some CEO is trying to push more slop”.

It’s not that people are always trying to be cheap or something. Sometimes they just want to focus on the core part of a project, like game devs the programming, musicians the music, painters the paint, animators the animation, etc. An animator isn’t trying to avoid working with someone else or trying to avoid paying a musician. They just want to present their art and choose something that works with it. AI made it really easy to ask for literally anything, when normally people would scrape for CC0 license stuff. AI became the most convenient option to slap something else on it that fits the vibe you want. Now, it looks or sounds like shit, but honestly I think it was always about convenience.