So art is just a status signifier? "This is hard to make so I must be really special"?

It is more useful to think about it in terms of what that effort actually entails.

If you haven't ever written a novel, or even a short story, you cannot possibly imagine how much of your own weird self ends up in it, and that is a huge part of what will make it interesting for people to read. You can also express ideas as subtext, through the application of technique and structure. I have never reached this level with any form of visual art but I imagine it's largely the same.

A prompt, or even a series of prompts, simply cannot encode such a rich payload. Another thing artists understand is that ideas are cheap and execution is everything; in practice, everything people are getting out of these AI tools is founded on a cheap idea and built from an averaging of everything the AI was trained on. There is nothing interesting in there, nothing unique, nothing more than superficially personal; just more of the most generic version of what you think you want. And I think a lot of people are finding that that isn't, in fact, what they want.

At the very least, art usually contains effort signifiers. Yes, an artist could potentially employ gingerbread men cut from construction paper in a work, but no, construction paper gingerbread men are typically not in the same league as David.

Uh, yes?

"This is hard to make" hasn't been the distinguishing factor for popular/expensive/trendy art for a long time.

There is a literal cliche "my six year old could've done this" about how some of the techniques do not require the years of training they used to.

And a literal cliche response about how the eye and execution is the current determining factor: "but they didn't."

Just like photography

For fun I decided to try out the find and replace on this comment

> Sorry... It's all slop buddy. The medium is the message, and photography's message is "I want it cheap and with low effort, and I don't care too much about how it looks"

Hmm... it seems like you have failed to actually make an argument here

So fun.

Photography is neither cheap nor low effort. Ask AI about it.

I literally just took a photo with my iPhone. So easy, took seconds.

and painting is so easy you can do it with dirt and a stick

And I can make music with my mouth. Cheap

For fun I decided to try out the find and replace on this comment

> Hmm... it seems like I have succeeded at making an argument here

What a barren viewpoint.

The logical implication of your view is that if someone or something has a halo, they can shit in your mouth and it's "good." The medium is the message, after all.

This is the same pretentious art bullshit that regular people fucking hate, just repackaged to take advantage of public rage at tech bro billionaires.