This is a bit "misguided" in my opinion.

The folks making these decisions are only "tech folk" in that they work in tech. Really these are professional businessmen who are focused on maximizing profit. If you left it to tech folk to make these decisions, then most of these companies would quickly fail as the tech folk fail to even try to make any money (let alone be able to understand consumers well enough to be able to make money from them).

>Lots of tech folks will see an AI make a CRUD app and think that means the AI will be equally capable of making art while missing why the overwhelming majority of the art community is against generative AI.

It's less about thinking that the technology that can quickly spin up an app could be used to quickly spin up some art and more about the ROI. Actual tech workers could probably leverage AI very effectively in "unoffending" ways, but they're really not the ones calling the shots. It's the MBAs who recognize that the quality of the product really doesn't matter if they can make the product cheap enough.

>The end result will be a lot of mass market art is going to become noticeable worse in the years to come in order to earn some shareholders a few extra cents in profit.

Brother, we're already living in this reality.

The article this thread is about provides the perfect example: Epic Games is working on a Disney game. These are two companies which are the epitome of generating "art" so efficiently that they're almost just generating the profit directly. Switching out some engineers for AI isn't going to make much of a difference in the end product.

For a specific example, "Star Wars" has been closer to AI generated "art" than it has been to actual "art" for nearly half a century at this point. It was just that back in the day you needed a bunch of nerds to produce the specific kinds of characters, settings, scenes, etc., needed to sell the underlying products. Now you can just use AI. But don't mistake the fact that it was humans working on it with it being "art." It's all driven by algorithms at the end of the day.

For what it's worth, those who actually appreciate "art" aren't the target audience. They never were. It's currently hip to hate AI, but the consumer base these companies target really do not care. They want slop. They wanted it before and they got it before, and they still want it now and they're going to get a lot more of it now.