Aside from the debates about "artistic merit" and the ethics of using AI trained on existing artists' work, one of the key things is that this new technology allows anyone to flood a place with images. There are some scifi-themed subreddits that I visit that allow posting art, and at this point it feels like 50% of all submissions are Midjourney/Dall-E generated art. Fine, it looks ok, but there's such a low barrier…
This could be solved on basically all arti communities by simply putting in a post limit per day. Say an artist can only upload 5 images per day or something, why would someone need to upload more than that?
This is like when we discovered stereo recording, and mixers would put tracks at either 100% left or 100% right, just to show off the novelty of it.
Or when 3D movies became ubiquitous and every movie (even those shot completely without the third dimension as a consideration) got released in 3D.
Once the novelty wears off, I imagine things will be better.
For now, it’s just a deluge of low-effort, yet high (relative to traditionally produced art) apparent quality artworks.