Comment by B1FIDO

You know...

Many artists through the ages have learned to work in various mediums, like sculpture of materials, oil painting, watercolors, fresco or whatever. There are myriad ways to express your visual art using physical materials.

Likewise, a girlfriend of mine was a college-educated artist, and she had some great output in all sorts of media, and had a great grasp of paints, and paper and canvas and what-have-you.

But she was also an Amiga aficionado, and then worked on the PCs I had, and ultimately the item she wanted most in life was a Wacom Tablet. This tablet was a force-multiplier for her art, and allowed her some real creative freedom to work in digital mediums and create art with ease that was unheard-of for messy oil paintings or whatever on canvas in your garage (we actually lived in a converted garage anyway.)

So, digital art was her saving grace, but also a significant leveler of playing fields. What would distinguish her original creativity from A.I.-generated stuff later on? Really not much. You could still make an oil or watercolor painting that is obviously hand-made. Forgeries of great artists have been perpetrated, but most of us can't explain, e.g. the Shroud of Turin anyway.

So generative A.I. is competing in these digital mediums, and perhaps 3D-printing is competing in the realm of physical objects, but it's unfortunate for artists that their choices have narrowed so far, that they are practically required to work in digital media exclusively, and master those apps, and therefore, they compete with gen A.I. in the virtual realm. That's just how it's gonna be, until folks go back to sculpting marble and painting soup cans.