Technology

My point is that this description literally applies just as much to humans. Humans are also trained on vast quantities of things they've seen before and meanings associated with them.

it’s a collage of other art

This is genuinely a misunderstanding of how these programs work.

when AI is used for art it takes jobs from artists and prevents the craft from advancing.

Because the only art anyone has ever done is when someone else paid them for it? There are a lot of art forms that generally aren't commercially viable, and it's very odd to insist that commercial viability is what advances an art form.

I do actually get regularly paid for a kind of work that is threatened by these things (although in my case it's LLMs, not images). For the time being I can out-perform ChatGPT and the like, but I don't expect that that will last forever. Either I'll end up incorporating it or I'll need to find something else to do. But I'm not going to stop doing my hobby versions of it.

Technology kills jobs all the time. We don't have many human calculators these days. If the work has value beyond the financial, people will keep doing it.