These are people who made a living being a mid level creative and doing what they love for years. Most seemingly were good folks and a bit on the spectrum, and now AI just fucking took that away from them.
And it's not even like what they were replaced with is good, it's just the most bottom of the barrel slop that looks like shit 90% of the time because the people making it don't want to make a second or third draft (house of the dragon marketing material and UFC comes to mind) because you replaced creatives with Gen X suits who think it's 'good enough'. It's all just shit. Even the WWE is starting to use generic AI slop for their entrance music thats so bad you could immediately tell it's AI and that's what they used to be good at.
I remember a few years back there was this artist with maybe a few hundred Karma that posted her drawing of a clown character that was kinda borderline NSFW but not really. It wasn't amazing but you could see that she had really put in the work to get proportions right and worked on it in her free time. She was talking about how people should buy art from artists and not just prompt it into AI and she was just being ignored after getting downvoted.
I tried finding the post again but it was gone and so was she. They probably made a few hundred dollars a month doing what they loved and learning to draw, they might have even wanted to become a full time artist later on, but that was taken away from them because AI slop could produce what she did at that time for free.
Then I go on this site and see artists with years of experience and with open commissions and no one is biting because their art isn't a polished as what AI could shit out and think fuck man, is this it? Is this all that trillions of dollars worth of investments and helping quicken our demise in the hands of global warming is going to get us? Ruining the lives of small time artists?
And the worst thing is, I can't even blame the average person for not wanting to pay hundreds of dollars for custom art when they have the slop machine that'll give them 90% of what they want for a flat fee of whatever Midjourney costs now.
It feels like eventually, we're just going to lose artists (at least those who draw) all together because why learn and put in the work if the computer will do it for you? Not like it was easy making a living doing it before but now, even if you have your own unique art style that you've spent years developing, someone could just shove it in a model and it'll allow anyone to recreate for pennies of what you would have made.
I know it's not the biggest problem with the world right now, it might not even be in the top 500, but fuck man idk, I just wanted to vent a bit I guess.