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Exactly. I'm not usually one to appeal to etymology for the "true meaning" of a word (the etymological fallacy is a thing), but in this case I think it's relevant to bring up. Art is from the Latin ars which means skill, craft and handiwork, among other things. To me, art isn't just a something that's nice to look at or even something that causes an emotional reaction of some sort. A natural landscape can be beautiful, but it's not art. To make something art, the human touch is exactly what's needed. Time, passion, effort and skill go into art. People talk about how generative AI lets anyone make art... but everyone can already make art.

It's certainly true that not everyone has the means to afford all the artistic tools they would like, but people have been making art for tens, if not hundreds of thousands of years with what they had access to. And I don't mean crude stick men, but sophisticated art which shows an understanding of animal anatomy and artistic techniques for producing effects of motion in a still image. If you actually want to make art and are willing to put in the effort, you can make great things with very little. Especially for people who pay for generative AI, there is really no excuse if you're using it to make "art". The image might look good, but it doesn't have any value if it's just another AI generated image among millions of others. Whatever restraints are "stopping" people from making their own art, I don't see how entering a prompt and letting a machine construct an image comes anywhere close to fulfilling someone's creative passion.