There are very few people who make a living doing the kind of "real art" you describe, and I'm not sure it's ever been any different. It seems like the middle

There are very few people who make a living doing the kind of "real art" you describe, and I'm not sure it's ever been any different. It seems like the middle 20th century was different, but it really wasn't. The number of soulful rock musicians or creative writers who got big contracts and made a good living was vanishingly tiny. Your odds of being the next Aerosmith or Stephen King was probably worse than your odds of becoming a pro athlete. Historically artists have always either been very poor or had wealthy patrons. I'm not sure AI is actually going to change these odds much... as in the odds of making a living off anything even resembling pure "from the heart" art. I've seen tons of AI generated artwork but so far I've seen virtually none that had an emotional or spiritual impact on me. It all feels like filler, like... "content." That is the profession AI is going to rapidly destroy. In 5-10 years you will no longer have more than a tiny handful of people employed churning out content for marketing and space filler purposes. The best historical analogy for present-day AI is photography. Photography decimated the old profession of portrait painting, but it had little effect on art for art's sake. Painting for the sake of pure art simply remained the tiny niche of mostly starving artists that it always has been. There's never been much money in it except for a tiny few who managed to get into the high-brow "aaaaaht" circuit.