Why don’t you shelve the pretentious corporate rhetoric yourself and re-read what I’ve suggested.
Get off the computer and pick up a pencil, or mound of clay, or whatever, and give it a few years of regular practice. Theres nothing pretentious about that. It will do everything and I will need to say nothing.
"It will do everything and I will need to say nothing".
Those are the pretentious parts of your reply.
It's just not true that everyone feels that practicing art is the main point. Sure, it can be developmental for an individual.
As I said elsewhere, if you think the artifact is all that matters then you are lost.
And I have better things to do than get mired in rhetorical bickering.
Once software has “eaten the world” then it will starve with nothing more of value to consume. I will still be here.
And for some bloody reason still doing my taxes by hand while some energy hungry machine churns out Rembrandt imitations that I don’t bother viewing.
A person who has become accustomed to taking an engineering (or yes, unfortunately enough, a marketing) approach throughout their life may be more naturally drawn to a process that appeals to them rather than one that is unfamiliar. Especially as they grow older and their way of the world solidifies, since up to that point that mindset has served them well in their usual non-art domain.
I will be the first to say that I do not consider genAI as "art" in the traditional sense. And that the two approaches are not, and will never be, equivalent for the reasons of personal self-development outlined elsewhere in this thread. At the same time, I did do as you say and spent a lot of time and effort on analogue pencil/ink on paper drawing for a year and a half in rebellion to this genAI commodification of everything. I did a few free tutorials but in general just tried to sit down somewhere and draw anything, free of any boundaries or restrictions, to keep my mind on drawing.
After months and months of it, on a near daily basis, I just lost interest. I didn't have a strong drive to get really good beyond what I considered chicken scratches.
Now of course you could say something like I needed to spend more effort instead of stopping that early not truly understanding the process of drawing, but to me it feels like fitting a square peg into a round hole. It's about different people having a different alignment of interests. For example I find music processing tools like pure data far more interesting than anything related to pen-on-paper, and have created a lot of things with them (without any AI involvement), arguably rather artistic things, in a shorter timeframe, because I enjoyed it more than drawing. Likely because those systems feel more like engineering to me.
So in my opinion, some portion of the people insisting on genAI's superiority as an approach (completely the wrong thing to say IMO) in reality wouldn't have had much interest in creating art perhaps for the rest of their lives if genAI hadn't been invented at all. GenAI to those people is an indicator of how invested they are in art/personal reflection/growth, etc. Which is: not much, in comparison to other things. But to them that's fine. And it wouldn't have been much different without genAI, only you wouldn't have heard of all those people in an art-world context 6 years ago anyway - save for something perspective-altering like psychedelics, maybe.
And this also applies between domains within art as well. A person's interest in digital painting may never reach the same level as that of EDM production. And some portion of those hypothetical EDM producers will, unfortunately or not, discover a way of reclaiming the leftover time for their less-important hobbies in smashing a button 10 times.
When the bar has been lowered so low that someone can push a button and have a flurry of artifact imitations spit out, people will be naturally curious for at least a short time. When a few of them also realize that this places the domain of "art" (for whichever faulty or not definition they started with) into an engineering realm involving all sorts of sparkly bits like k-diffusion methods and LoRAs and UNets and activation functions and such, it's not surprising that some engineering-minded people would think to themselves "oh, this can become my way of expressing myself." However flawed that reasoning may be.
then it's likely that you're discussing people who don't consider themselves artists. i used to know some folks who did graphic design for advertisements - they didn't consider that art, as the point of the banners etc that they made was to attract attention and get people to spend money on a client's website, not to express themselves in some meaningful way. they were under no delusion that they were creating anything that could be considered near the same category as a Picasso (for example).
