It is all too easy to see creative work and the creators themselves as simple solutions to a problem,
particularly in case of projects that require their talent and skills to produce content for e.g. media display technologies.
Drawing a firm line between the terms “content creator” and “artist” in this context obviously depends very much on one’s own, highly subjective definitions of said terms.
At present I am not too concerned about whether one sees artists as exceptional individual beings that appear “sui generis” and contain all the seeds of their creative genius within themselves, or more along the lines of T.S. Eliot in his essay “Tradition and the Individual Poet”.
What matters to me is the large number of individuals and companies who outwardly communicate their dedication to and appreciation of creatives and artists in performative acts of virtue-signaling, whilst actually at the same time integrating AI tools into their project workflows that are mostly based on illegitimately scraped datasets.
It is also interesting to note in this respect how many individuals now claim the terms “creator” and “artist” for themselves in a way that would have merely illicited a chuckle twenty years ago. This is of course an expected tactic of moving semantic goal posts to accommodate one’s own best economic interests.
I am fully aware that in any highly competitive market cost cutting is part of the game, but if we really care about artists, we owe it to them not to remain silent when more and more affluent companies are adding insult to injury by simultaneously claiming to care for them, whilst backstabbing them at the same time.
Choose one or the other. Anything else is hypocrisy.