There is hardly scarcity in art now, though. Not as a whole. If you like a particular style, you can usually find it at an affordable price so long as you aren't going by "famous" or "brand name".

I'll also add that scarcity will be simply built-in. Most folks won't initiate such art - and such art has to be initiated. There will still be a personal selection process going on with a human behind the scenes. Just because the computer can make so many doesn't mean we'll see that many at all. I imagine it will eventually edge out some art forms: Making advertising graphics for movies and print, for example. Making logos. And so on.

> So where is the scarcity?

Up one meta-level. The artwork isn't the sonata, or the portrait, or the sculpture. The artwork is the algorithm and input data.

Scarcity matters if you regard art as a commodity to be bought and sold. Otherwise I don't see why it's important.

I recommend John Berger's "Ways of Seeing", available on YouTube. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ways_of_Seeing

Wide as an ocean deep as a puddle. It will have the same problems as the procedurally generated worlds in No man's sky.

In an era where artworks are already abundant, curation creates scarcity. Not all works are considered equal.

There's already no scarcity of stories, music, photography, paintings or sketches. Even with the higher cost of production for movies there's still more than most people could reasonably watch in a lifetime. Aren't we already past that point without AI?

Furthermore, I'd argue that it's _better_ to be without scarcity in art, because a larger pool of differences in available art makes it far more likely for any random individual to find a piece that resonates specifically with themselves.

It's the same logic with e.g. books: if there are 100 great books, people are going to love those books and some subset of people are going to find a book and say, "wow, this book was really meant for me". If there are 1,000,000 great books, then 1) there's going to be a wider selection for people who enjoy more niche aspects in books who wouldn't otherwise find those, and 2) there's a much higher chance of one of those million books really resonating with any random individual.

The real struggle is in curation and recommendation: which of these million books would John Smith _most_ like (ideally more than, say, the original 100 books), instead of requiring him to peruse through them all on his own.

The scarcity is in the "quality" - its ability to move us in new and interesting ways, just like now. A trillion similar things are not very interesting, so quality stands out.

Why do we need scarcity?