Comrade, I understand and agree with most of what you're saying, but

Feeling jaded because technology has made your hard fought skills obsolete is the "sunk costs" fallacy crossed with jealousy. It is emotional, illogical and reactionary.

You completely lost me here. We are (and I say we because I do not like the prospect of automating artistic endeavors) not even remotely concerned about it making manual art obsolete. Manual art has numerous upsides, not the least of which is the sheer degree of control the user has over what they're portraying, and as a result the ability to inspect quite literally every line of detail and consider if it fits what one is trying to portray. This level of control, this ability to portray, is not necessarily something AI art is incapable of, but AI art as a tool is fundamentally designed to do the exact opposite. It is like music sampling; The artistic portrayal doesn't come from the general societal conceptions that are regurgitated by the tool, but by the ways that an artist uses or modifies it. "Modifying" in this case would include modifying the model itself or it's variables, in my opinion, but not changing prompts (merely changing what words the AI reproduces societal attitudes of does not change that it is just reproducing societal attitudes, unless one goes so deep into detailing visual differences that I doubt the AI actually responds to it properly).

When we naively accept that these "naive regurgitations" are art in and of themselves, and even worse, normalize them as equal to manual art or an actually artistic use of AI art thereof, we trivialize actual human interpretation of the world around us. And this is the path we are currently racing towards at a terrifying speed.

I do not want us to "RETVRN" to manual art, I do not think AI art is "inferior" arbitrarily merely because I am scared of new things, but fundamentally I am opposed to the automation of a good that has to be produced manually (meaning not automatically, some uses of AI art could fall under that definition of manual here IMO, so I am using the term manual differently here than the rest of my comment) to fulfill a basic human need (that being the artistic reinterpretation of the world around us). Yes, this is fundamentally an issue that only exists under capitalism, but as we do not have a socialist revolution happening anytime soon, it's worth talking about other solutions for the right now.

I do not agree with the hostile tone of the other poster.

You know what is a completely irredeemable piece of technology? AI text generation. I don’t care if it makes me reactionary, until we find a practical way to actually help disabled people or something using it AI text generation can only exist as a shit substitute to human interaction and is shit in general. Fucking glorified exam cheating tool, we should only allow exam cheaters to use it. Fuck that shit