If a computer can create better at than you, maybe it’s because the computer stole all your art and combined it with everyone else’s.

The replacement of art by AI has very little in common with the replacement of horses by cars. Art is an inherently subjective thing that does not fill a singular, tangible role in society. AI, by it’s very nature, can never properly replace human made art. Especially since AI art can only exist because of human creations.

Us artists don’t think we deserve special treatment, we just don’t want to see something we love get ruined because of a computer that stole all of our work.

To be fair, every good artist is going to start out as a bad artist, but if people give up at that early stage, they’ll never get better. Personally though, I don’t think AI is going to replace artists, as a group. It will replace some artists, those who’s work is most readily replaceable and which don’t get some of their perceived value from the identity of the artist themselves, and this is going to cause real problems for these people that should not be ignored; but art as a whole will still exist, and even still exist as a profession. There are any number of niches where the identity of the artist themselves is part of the appeal of the art they make (for example, a painting of a soup can, by itself, is probably nothing particularly special or appealing as paintings go. A painting of a soup can by Andy Warhol is the sort of thing that might be displayed in art galleries and be considered very valuable. Or for a less “gallery art” example, if a small time artist who does, say, an independent animated cartoon series, or does character art commissions, or such, has acquired a fanbase around their work, they will probably still be able to get donations or commission requests from those people, because even if an AI could create something that looks similar, it would not have the appeal of being from that person for those fans.) That isn’t even getting into physical art mediums, I don’t expect that stable diffusion or whatever is going to replacing an artist who makes metal sculptures, for instance.

On some level, it might ultimately help some artists be more productive too. AIs that can create pictures from a prompt are cool and all, but just text isn’t always enough to clearly communicate an image one has in one’s head. I see no reason they also couldn’t be subtly incorporated into digital art tools to make it easier for an artist to create exactly what they are imagining, say, you could have an AI that figures out where the borders between objects are in a drawing and so lets one fill in lineart quickly even of it has gaps, or generate reference images from a specific angle at a chosen part of a drawing to help plan out how everything works in a scene, or fill in what is behind something when part of a drawing is erased (I’ve already seen tools that do that one).

Ultimately, I suspect that this will be somewhat analogous to how there are still tailors and blacksmiths in the world, even though we automated the production of clothing and metal tools long ago. There aren’t as many of them, sure, but their crafts still exist, there are still people that make a living doing those things, and those that exist today have tools their predecessors wouldn’t have dreamed of, like sewing machines and power hammers.

Why do “artists” think they’re holy and should be protected?

Has anyone ever implied that it’s just artists? Automation putting people out of work has always been a major fear, and has been realized over and over again. It’s not “just artists,” it just so happens that art is the current domino to fall.