Nobody I know says this. In fact, I've never heard of this ever before, and I read artist and hobby communities pretty hostile to AI, but I never once read this nice strawman you've built.
People say you should use a real artist instead of AI for a multitude of reasons:
- Because they want to enjoy art created by humans.
- Because it provides a living to artists, even artists for minor work like advertising or lesser commercial illustrations.
- Because AI "art" is built by stealing from human artists, and while human art has a history of copying and cloning, never before has tech allowed this in such a massive, soulless scale.
Sam Altman gave a deranged, completely out of touch reply, and he should be called to task for it, not defended. A human being is not some number on a spreadsheet, built over 20 years in order to achieve some "smartness" goal. That's a very stupid thing to say.
That human would require the same amount of water whether you ask them to draw or not, and would exist anyway because they are not born for productivity reasons. "Creation" of humans isn't driven by the amount of work to accomplish.
You are not causing more water to be used by asking a human to work on something.
Same for energy consumption.
This argument doesn't work at all.
What you do for humans to use fewer resources is to work on making us produce less garbage, and produce things using techniques that are less resource-intensive.