It absolutely is true. If people can’t afford the time to create, what you’ll see is a hyper-accelerated version of the fine art world, with AI art for the masses, and human-made art for the wealthy either by commission or by those wealthy enough to spend the time learning to create their own, never to be seen by anyone else. And since AI work is a derivative of the work in its data set, it will degrade in quality over time as those data sets become filled with AI generated work. We’re already seeing this with stuff like ChatGPT.

It’s only been in the past 50-100 years that your average person has been able to buy art. Before then, art was relegated to the wealthy. Artists had patrons, people with more money than sense who were willing to pay the artist enough that they could spend their time making art instead of working, or they made commissioned pieces for the wealthy: private art for their homes, public statues and pieces for temples venerating the person who had it commissioned, stuff like that.