I think what has happened (and I’ve been hit by this in the past, it is very annoying) is: You included the bit in the beginning about being generally skeptical of AI art in some forms to signal that you are somebody with a nuanced opinion, who believes that the thing can be bad at times. Then, you go on to describe that this isn’t one of those times.

Unfortunately, this gets you some comments that want to disagree with that less specific, initial aside. I’m not sure if people just read the first paragraph and respond entirely based on that, without realizing that it is not the main point of the rest of the post. Or if they just don’t want to give up the ground that you did in the beginning, at all, so they knowingly ignore the rest of the post.

I don’t really know what to do about this sort of thing. It seems like… generally nice to be able to start a post with something that says basically: look I’ve thought about this and it isn’t an uninformed reflexive take. But I’m trying to give up on that sort of thing. It isn’t really logically part of the argument, and it ends with people arguing in a direction that I’m not really interested in defending against in this context.

But it does seem a shame, because, while it isn’t logically part of the argument, it is nice to know beforehand how firm somebody’s stance is.