I don’t have an issue with AI-generated art as a concept. An artist friend of mine did a series of AI art that was really moving, and it wouldn’t have been possible to do without AI. He was upfront about the use of AI and even incorporated it into the art itself.

My issue is masquerading AI-generated art as human-created. If I pay $60 for a book of art, I’m not just paying for the art. I’m paying for the time it took the artist to create these works, for the creativity they’ve cultivated over the years, and for ongoing support for them to be able to create more works like this in the future. We can debate how you value the worth of a good (ie if you have two identical dishes, one cooked carefully by a trained chef and another made by a machine, which is worth more?), but to me, it’s not simply about the outcome.

Paying $60 for a book whose art was generated using some text prompts, especially when I expected it to be human-made, feels like a slap in the face.

(And definitely, but I would argue that a human drawing on a screen with a brush tool is different than using a generative AI network to produce entire images via text)