Alt text: a post from @lolennui.bsky.social that says: Once my German friend asked what creative people do without arts grants and other support in the US and I felt like a parent trying to explain to their kid that the puppies can die sometimes
If you have some free time and aren't easily depressed, go ahead and look up the backgrounds of your favorite, recently ascendant artists. Many, if not most of them come from privileged backgrounds, have wealthy spouses, trust funds, or familial industry connections.
And while I personally don't think that such advantages necessarily diminish the importance of their art, just think of how much more potentially moving and profound work we'll never see just because the people who should be making it never got chance to develop, since they've been too busy just trying to keep a roof over their heads.
I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.
I was a very talented artist and musician growing up and all through high school, from a nice poor family.
Had to join the army and become an engineer, no trust fund to write books and make music. Luckily at this stage in my life both are possible in my free time, but wished I could do other things than engineer.
Boooo, that will never compare to the personal satisfaction of honing a craft.
Edit: machine generation can be fun but I promise it's not as fulfilling as finding something you love doing purely for the sake of it and watching your progress over years.
Well if they said that they would be objectively wrong. An AI puts no thought into it's creation, despite the misleading name. It simply is able to approximate an imitation of the artwork it's trained on.