I'm classically trained and come from a traditional arts background (been using my own music for our company's promo videos lately if you want to check them out) but I think a lot of the sentiment around the anti-AI camps have it all wrong - they should be welcoming the new cohorts of people identifying as "AI artists" with open arms. Here's why: • Criticism from the public around your art is part of being an artist - which many of them are learning as we speak. • For a lot of people - especially if they weren't privileged enough to have access to lessons when younger - AI is their "entry point" into learning the craft. The ones that want to take it to the next level will eventually get interested in learning the fundamentals (theory/form/composition/meaning/etc.) to improve their output. • Both traditional and AI artists face the same problem: "how do I get paid for this?" There's a lot of things in the art/content spaces that needs fixing and this is an opportunity to get more people on the side of copyright/IP/royalties reform. • As of now, AI-generated content is flooding all platforms everywhere, which will eventually cause the entire model to collapse - or, force companies to take the idea of quality control more seriously. (See above: the way to get quality is to actually pay the folks doing the work.) • Recent AI models - as a combination of necessity and regulations - now are pretty good at giving attribution to its sources. This paves the way for royalties models that were not possible before. I was always an AI-skeptic and still am - I get the frustrations behind the tech because early models were doing some blatantly illegal things, which has landed a lot of them in trouble now. But don't let that allow you to punch downwards or sideways - we don't need artists fighting other artists because that's exactly what they want. The battle isn't traditional artists vs AI artists, but artists vs. the law. If you're going to get mad, do it with issues worth getting mad about - look up the Berne Convention and how it *doesn't* apply to creatives in the US, regardless of how the work was made. That's the stuff we should be focusing on if you really want things to change.