> Of course, everyone creates things from their own perspective and context, but it kind of feels like a trap that somehow suffering is essential to the artistic process, which I personally don't feel would be a healthy perspective for myself as a musician at least.

Suffering may be too strong a word. You have to feel something to make good art. There needs to be at least a kernel of something raw and real.

That’s the difference between art art and hotel lobby art. Art art expresses something the artist wanted to say. Hotel lobby art just fills space. Both can be good, but the goals are different. You can even make art art on commission for a hotel lobby! And most passersby will intuitively see that there’s a difference, it feels not bland somehow.

Or for example last night I did something creative: drawings. It wasn’t art art, I wasn’t expressing anything, I just wanted hand-drawn pictures of a few plants and an hour of relaxing.

I later asked ChatGPT to redraw one of my drawings. The result was far superior in every technical aspect. But somehow bland. You could tell it wasn’t _my_ venus fly trap, it was a generic representation of a cartoon idea of a venus fly trap. More of a pictogram really. A lot of what these AIs create has that same feeling of generic nonspecificity.