I am all for supporting local artists and I feel that “handcrafted in XXX” products make great souvenirs when you’re connected to those places. Still, if some AI hallucinated me a perfect novel for my interests, or generated something I couldnt tell was manufactured or created by a master, I would happily enjoy it.
“How can I tell if this is slop so I can know to hate it” sounds stupid to me: good is good. When it comes to art / food / products, I want the best experience for ME. If I want human connectedness, then I’ll go interact with a human directly.
I can do without wasted water, power, and money, but in the abstract it seems to bother everyone on Lemmy to enjoy something a person didn’t make. I don’t have that hang-up.
But Shakespeare was a living human at one point, and if an alien is making something it’s also a living organism. Or enjoying birds singing or a trail of ants grabbing food. LLMs and image/video generation is a piece of software that runs on computers that was built off of all collective human data found on the internet with no permission, and you have marketers and layman claiming it’s sentient (same people probably wouldnt grant sentience to another living organism like a bee or a fish btw) when it’s very arguable that it’s not sentient at all and you have people treating it like it is. Like…even if you like the output not caring about where it comes from is just ridiculously careless. Why not boil some rats and listen to the screams if you don’t care about the source of things as long as it’s entertaining you.
I’m not following your argument here. Your commentary on sentience (by which you really mean sapience I think. A bee or a fish probably IS sentient) seems to be reverting to “it’s reckless to like things made by non-people”. I don’t know how you get to there from “art is not connecting you meaningfully to past figures or aliens as compared to direct human interaction”.