Yes, media production is not fun. And that's what we as humans value in art - the labor. Easy things don't impress us. And by sticking to the default, easy option, with barely any good reason to embrace the suck and learn the difficult tools and processes, I can only see decline.
The comment section was full of AI-generated edits to this image which exaggerated it or changed the setting in various creative ways - making his leg even longer, making his leg extend over a giant chasm, adding a bench behind him so he was performing a Bulgarian split squat. I giggled my way through the comments.
This form of humor - of being able to take human in-jokes and run with them - was not possible before artificial intelligence, and it was very funny! Memes are about to get so much more varied and funny as the effort requirement drops. We're nowhere near the effort ceiling in terms of making great memes, most people just simply do not have the time, resources or patience to actualise their mind's eye. It reminded me of exactly the kind of dumb joke and rehashing that made YTPs so special in the first place. I don't know if this is high art, but it is art, and I don't think YTPs were a particularly special form of comedy outside of our rose-tinted memories of childhood.
There's still the capacity for human labor and uniqueness to be embedded in AI-generated media - only the first breaths of low-quality algoslop lacked that. Expression and mimetics will change, and I think children born today will get to enjoy richer and funnier content than we did now that they are unshackled from GMod stop motion.
I think it's more of the case that labor is correlated with uniqueness. And I think uniqueness is closer to what people are truly looking for in art.
Media production is often laborious and unfun. I learned that the hard way the first time I whipped out the physgun in Garry's Mod and started trying to make something funny. That experience was absolutely buns and the consequence is I didn't get to make as many fun things to share and enjoy as I could have.
My suspicion is that the people leading the outrage from a creative perspective is people who were, by-and-large, struggling/failing to make it in a creative industry before AI, and this is the outlet for that pent up frustration.
The closest I've come to sympathising has been witnessing the death of the farmer's market under a sea of generic AI slop and Temu garbage. And while sad, that feels like more of a story about globalising supply chains than one about the death of creativity.
The pessimism of Blueskyism feels very alien to me.