In a post-scarcity solarpunk future, I could imagine some reasonable uses, but that’s not the world we’re living in yet.
AI art has already poisoned the creative environment. I commissioned an artist for my latest solarpunk novel, and they used AI without telling me. I had to scrap that illustration. Then the next person I tried to hire claimed they could do the work without AI but in fact they could not.
All that is to say, fuck generative AI and fuck capitalism!
But that’s not what these generative AIs do. They use actual content for training, but all generations are unique… Just like actual art
If you go to college for art you are actively required to use specific licensed learning materials to learn from. They don’t just go get random training material off the web and go “draw like this but make it your own”. The same principles apply. The AI has no filters. It has no way of determining what is copyright infringement and what isn’t. It can’t decide what is fair use and what isn’t.
But that’s specific to universities as institutions, not art as a concept. There are plenty of artists without formal education that got inspiration from the things we saw. We could have a discussion about how internet scrapers get their data, however that’s a different conversation. AI art isn’t stealing content, it’s using existing content (in albeit questionable ways) to generate new and unique content.