Yes there is demand for art, but art is produced by people.

AI is only able to do what it can by mimicking the art of others. By plagiarizing that work, it prevents artists from getting paid to create art and discourages people from creating and sharing art on the internet in the first place. You may not care about them, or value creativity, but image generation relies on creative people putting new artwork on the net.

What are your bots going to create when they have nothing to feed on but themselves?

That’s the fun upside to the internet becoming filled and killed with AI slop: AI companies are literally poisoning their own models. (Data poisoning that is)

Predictive models of any kind produce error, and when you train on predicted data you compound that error.

Unless AI scrapers can differentiate AI generated “art” from human generated art (which would mean that AI art never truly becomes indistinguishable-from or as-good-as human art, something techbros and idiots would be upset about), generative AI will eat its own tail in an oddly literal sense.

The more the web fills with slop, the more AI will train on it, and the worse and worse the models will get at generating good looking images, leading the images they produce (and the ones they inevitably train on) to decrease in quality, hastening the cycle of their own degradation.