Why AI art is so controversial

I'm an artist myself, and I've noticed a major difference in how AI versus humans use pre-existing sources to create their own art. Humans start by copying, tracing, and referencing things they see, without much of an understanding of why they have to draw thumbs towards each other sometimes, and away from each other at different times. However, as they build upon their art skills and study the world around them, they begin to develop a style and understanding of their environment that is unique to them. That is the beauty of human-made art; it is physical proof of their development and worldview, and cannot truly be replicated in the ways that matter.

To describe how AI art works, it is easiest to first describe how AI is able to generate text and stories. According to the article "AI Art is not 'AI-Generated Art.' It Is Engineer-Generated Art", the Markov chain is a probability table that AI frequently uses to generate English text based on a piece of text it was trained on, which gave pretty impressive results at first. This method was able to generate many coherent English words and phrases, but when it was trained on its *own* text, the quality of writing degraded until the output was no longer creative or meaningful (an example of this is the following excerpt it wrote: "xwijbbxildympnmjhybgvr you withosefright the bricks the blewthe bricks the blewthe blewthe bricks the blewthe bricks the bricks"). AI is not able to learn from its own creations, and has to rely on outside intelligence to create meaningful works. This wouldn't be too dissimilar from how humans learn, *if* AI was eventually able to create its own art without taking the data from art that already exists. However, we can see that it cannot function without constantly taking from the hard work of others, which separates the two from each other.

Even if AI art reached the same level of independency as humans when it comes to art, the question turns into: What's the point? I saw a comment here stating that creating art gives people joy, and that there is no reason to automate it. Even if we reach a stage where AI is able to create things to the same degree as humans, it will never experience the joy of creation that humans do. It will drive humans out of the art industry, which people truly love being a part of, simply because it creates art faster. This art will have no sentimental value, no emotions driving it, which will suck the life out of art.