I’ve been an artist for over 4 decades, studied art, taught art.. and you are correct. While AI almost assuredly won’t be revolutionizing art, music, movies, culture (beyond a temporary “ai is so neat, lol” trend), it doesn’t have to in order to collapse those industries. Those industries move in cycles and a shit ton of elements, trends are repeated throughout history. So while occasionally an artist or group of artists change everything and redirect the course of their fields, things always cycle back to some basic ideas and forms that previous generations have already explored, so humans are move than happy to just enjoy what’s already been, slightly tweaked. Every story is in Homer’s Odyssey, or in Shakespeare’s prose. Every advert uses basics elements to entice, to attract, to maintain attention, to be memorable. Every genre of music builds on the same chords and fuses elements from generations past.

Ai doesn’t have to innovate and reinvent entire industries, it just has to “disrupt” them enough by getting good enough to be just good enough, and that will make already slim profit margins and already bare markets untenable for already starving artists. All that will be left will be those that are already rich, already entrenched and employed by the largest corporations that pay for artisanal craftsmanship, or those that are wealthy enough to cosplay as serious artists for self gratification. None of those will produce satisfying art, none will do it for necessity, they’ll do it for selfish and opulent reasons, which results in soulless and gauche art that might as well never be seen by the public and just circulate the walls of the private spaces enjoyed solely by the ruling class.

You can stop worrying.

Business ALWAYS chooses the quick and easy (cheap) way. Have you seen those quarterly reports?

isn't producing better art the point of starving artists? or am I misunderstanding the phrase?

I agree. However, people should be aware that even if their city or county reports water and power usage, the numbers are useless without third party independent verification. They have already shown they are happy to break the law, cheat the system, steal, hide, whatever it takes.

If Coca Cola didn't turn 2800 million litres of water into soda, people would drink that 2800 million litres of water in some other form anyway. Same goes for any company that creates drinks of any kind, it isn't "consumed" in the process. If water ever truly can be, it always evaporates and rains down somewhere.

And depending on where you live versus where it's bottled, not doing so might in fact be rather disastrous. In many densely populated areas of the world the scarcity of fresh water is cause by the water cycle not being balanced - water is gathered from vast area and piped to a city, but when it is "consumed" and returns to the water cycle, it doesn't rain back to those collection areas. Like for example, most of the entire west of the United States.

I remember looking into this years ago, desalination is a reasonable solution (for houshold usage in developed nations) at only a few times the ridiculously low water cost we have now. Agriculture is the issue because it currently depends on insane amounts of cheap water dispite there being more water efficient methods of growing crops (indoor hydroponics).

first result https://hannahritchie.substack.com/p/how-much-energy-does-desalinisation

You can collect water from your roof