I'm more sympathetic to the artists, but I'm not convinced that AI art is theft.

I grant that they are concerned with competition. However, art is not made for the purposes of generating the most pictures, or the most accurate reproductions.

Clay works still exist, pencil drawings still exist, humans still work in technologically primitive mediums because art is not really like other industries, because old technologies that are technically obsolete, still get used for centuries.

I definitely get that there are some small-time nobody digital artists who are trying to get into art and visual design and feel threatened by this, but I'm not entirely convinced that they'll actually be pushed out of the market. At such a small level, I feel like the art and the artist are a selling point.

If anything, this seems to be a fight between the artist and coder, and I think in the future, those skills are just going to have to be shared between the two. Artist must be a minor coder, and the coder a minor artist.