It can still be technically incredible while not being pleasant to have it proliferate.

This surely varies by platform, but in the occasional glances I make at social media feeds it feels like uncanny, off-putting AI slop is creeping up in percentage of content. I can't speak for GP but that affects how I feel when I see AI generated imagery, whether or not I'm impressed by the technical capability.

I have felt both of those things simultaneously for years. It's cool that computers can just do this now, but it's completely missing the spirit of art and I hate looking at it.

This is not "kind of close, but not as accurate as a ray traced image", it's just completely wrong. The whale itself is fine: sun comes from behind, and sun rays refract inside the whale to make it glow. Believable enough. But then the whale is somehow shining light on the clouds below it, as if the sun was high in the sky and slightly to the left. Which is decidedly not where the sun is. And then out of nowhere light from round church windows shines on the church - but nothing on the whale has that shape, and that side of the church isn't even facing the church

I can only conclude that this image is taken on a world with two sun (one in frame, one out of frame to the top left), and somewhere out of frame in the same direction are floating church windows. Even then we might need a third sun to make this work

A local playground has multiple giant walls decorated with images in the following style:

https://share.google/bJFHzUfQnyowJhPa1

Let's not pretend the technology is what we're mad about here.