> The flip side of this is that if we undermine paid creators until there's no incentive for them to create

The incentive to create is almost never financial. How many artists finance their creative efforts by working day jobs? Making a living as an artist is more about buying yourself the time to focus on making art than it is about making money. People will continue to create art, however they can, because they must.

I agree that people wouldn't stop making art. Sorry to shift the goalposts here: I do think that there are types of art that are not created except for commercial reasons, and that body of work is what I would expect to get displaced by AI. In fact it already is, Advertising creative media is one example, it's an industry I am involved in and we are already seeing Dall-E and ChatGPT getting used for quickly concepting ideations for clients etc. I would expect an AI to get worse at meeting commercial needs over time because of what I said in my original comment. Or at least for commercial creative media to stagnate if it could only use AI (because no one is making commercial media just for fun).

This is all stuff I am actively thinking about since it is impacting me right now, so I appreciate the discussion and would be happy to be wrong.

AI models need human creative decisions as part of the process of making art.

>if we undermine paid creators

I'm not even slightly concerned about that.

1. Art is better when it's not paid. Real artists have day jobs that pay the bills and they create art to express their ideas, not to make money.

2. Paid art isn't going away, it will just change. Certain skillsets will be forgotten, like how landscape painting was replaced by photography. But talented artists will leverage AI tools to create works that are greater than anything that came before.

> Art is better when it's not paid. Real artists have day jobs that pay the bills and they create art to express their ideas, not to make money.

Trying to define who "real" artists are is a folly for the ages. It is the dream of many artists that they get paid for their art, and many achieve it. The starving artist is a mythos of pain and suffering, a good story but hardly good for art. Some of the best composers from history were paid, some of the most influential artists were from wealthy families. They were able to focus on their work without fear of money and because of this they could excel in techique and execution, which allowed them to produce some of the highest forms of their art in history.