And pursuing a greater reach impacts artistic value how?
Value is subjective. If I don't ever get to experience an artwork, it is of no value to me.
Because I can only think of negatives. The wider an audience that one seeks, the more generic and bowdlerized one needs to make one's work. A work that a handful of people love is better than one that everyone on Earth agrees is ok.
You ignore the power of "and" - the work that a handful of people love
AND that everyone else on Earth agrees is okay,
AND that some people find horrible...
If someone said that if there was
NO financial motive for art, there would be no art, you'd tell them they were being silly - some people will make art without any financial motive. And you'd be correct.
But you seem to be saying that as soon as one gets any recompense for art, all their art becomes of no value, made for the lowest common denominator - and that's just as silly, for
exactly the same reason. Ergo, financial motives are not a death knell for art, in general.
For our purposes, financial support from art increases the opportunities to create art. If artistic creation means the artist doesn't have to spend their days sorting recycling, that means they can make more art! And, until we are in a post-scarcity world, the way to keep the artist from sorting bottles and cans is to
pay them for their art.
And that feeds back into the positives of AI. It shows me what I ask it for, not what somebody else thought would sell.
Well, it rehashes prior works to give what it has been trained is associated with what you input. Whether that resutl is actually "what you asked for" is another question, especially when those who actually own the AIs get to skew the models to give the results
they want.
And suddenly all your dragons have Pepsi product placement in them, or follow Elon Musk's art direction guidelines for what is "acceptable"...