Will AI art disrupt or enhance the role of human artists?
No one knows what future AI will or won't be capable of - beyond the likelihood that AI mistakes will decrease as models get better. We can only speak about the current state of affairs.
Is AI going to replace human artists? Not at large scales, any time soon. Skilled artists can use it to create things they could not before, or to create more things than they could before. Unskilled "artists" (I include myself here) will use it to smear the walls with shit like a lunatic asylum. Is that good or bad? I don't know. There may end up being too much noise that drowns out the legitimate art, but tbh, the internet was already that way before AI came around.
Some artists absolutely will be impacted negatively, mostly by stupid bosses who think they can do just as good of a job by asking an AI to do what their artist was doing; they will probably be disappointed with the result, but too proud to admit their error.
Can creativity be fully automated, or is there something irreplaceable about human touch in art?
IMO, the no-effort garbage that most users create with AI does not qualify for the label "art". Almost all of it looks like crap. Almost all of it is unoriginal. If you're willing to put time and effort into learning how to use the tools, and get your hands dirty, you can use AI to make some pretty pictures that
maybe qualify as art. A true artist can use AI to make magic happen. There absolutely is an element of the human in true art created with AI, even if none of the pixels are placed by a human hand.
What are the ethical implications of using AI to replicate styles of famous artists?
When it comes to style... legally speaking, nobody can own a style. Without even bringing AI into the equation, you can copy the style of whatever artist you like as much as you want. If you want to draw a scene in Miyazaki's style from
Spirited Away, you can. If you want to create a 3d character in the Pixar animation style, you can. Style is not legally protected. Of course, whether something is
legal is distinct from whether it is
ethical, but it is a reasonable starting point for that discussion.
I don't think there is inherently any difference between humans copying a style and AI copying a style. I ground that in the argument that AI training from existing art is fundamentally no different from humans learning from existing art, and learning from art is one of the core exceptions to copyright - not just from a legal perspective, but from an ethical one. If AI learning from art is ethical, then any application of that learning that would be ethical for a human to do is also ethical for the AI. AI applying a style it learned is no different from a human applying a style s/he learned. On top of that, AI is just a tool: tools do not inherently have moral or ethical values, that comes from their use, which brings the human back into the equation. Either copying styles is ethical, irrespective of the tools used, or it isn't. AI isn't a factor.