I was under the impression people just gave up or gave in. There was nothing worse than working for several hours on a project, then being asked if AI made it. That sucked the soul out of it. People can't even trust what they see anymore. Art was the first to go.
It's exactly like that. I wanted to make time lapse videos for reels just so I could fit their mold of what the algorithm wants, the trend in X just adds more to the pressure of conforming because a lack of time lapse videos increase your chances that you anime art is faked and how can you be this good in such a short time? the witch hunters are like a hit or miss crowd consisting of people that know their stuff and those that didn't work on their fundamentals to tell what is good art at a technical level. Most of the time it's just a bunch of teens and early 20's spewing crap on honest artists but this is the culture opened by generative AI.
There are artists with established fan bases that came out using AI as part of their process during rendering which received backlash due to their initial stance against it.
I've seen some art posts on Hive that looks traced art but I ain't rocking boats or starting witch hunts. If art curators want to support that kind of content, that's their money.
Then there's the AI bros crowd who secretly like the fall of artists while sharing a merch and profile pretending to be legit artists faking their stuff for as long as possible. It's an interesting development considering we may see this trend coming into literature as writers will use AI to check grammar and recommend the generic way to write which is nth times overused by other authors.
I've noticed a lot of traced art here over the years. Certain I've seen all the tricks here, and plenty falling for it. These days I won't say a damn thing. The root of the problem is the lackluster effort supporting content. With so few eyes, a lot of things can slip through the cracks. I didn't make that mess.
Generated literature and "information" has no value whatsoever. AI won't even use it to train itself. Garbage in, garbage out. Original data is like gold these days. And they can't get enough, mainly because the internet was flooded with generated nonsense. People thought it was some big advancement and an amazing tool, but it came alive and started eating itself to death.