The camera did enable painters to pretend they were, for hours, at a scene they painted, but instead they painted photographs from others. Artists are not angels, they do the same "bad" things than OpenAI
He was not able to create a monopoly on the creation of paintings across the entire world and undercut the price and ability of all other painters.
It’s not a sensible comparisons.
You can make your argument validly against DALL•E or Midjourney families, but we've also got the Stable Diffusion family of models that anyone can just grab a copy of.
What does not remain to be seen though is that generative ai is going to put a lot of artists out of work.
You can argue about the good and bad of that but it’s defo happening.
What if da Vinci had been superhuman and could take on 1,000,000 commissions per day and had also taught himself every style of art and would do each commission for 0.001x the cost of anyone else.
Yes society as a whole benefit from a fantastic amount of super high quality art.
But the other artists are not gonna be so happy with the situation are they?
There isn’t a human right to make money from art.
People make decisions based on what society deems valuable. That changes over time and has for the entirety of human history.
Maybe there’s a demand for more customized art. Maybe spite patronage will make a comeback.
Anyone telling you they know how it will shake out is a fraud. But the incentives we’ve set up have a natural push and pull to get people to do what society values.