What I have to say about AI will take to long, so Im going to skip that topic completely. You landed on something good with the meaning of art, ill continue that thread of thought with some of my own:

Genre. Genre is not a static concept, its an amalgam of various items which is labelled after the fact due to their similarity. Pre-AI, every artist is a brick layer and genre is the building, so theres value in pushing the genre a certain direction.

Sub culture: culture is the nature of the discourse between fans of a genre. Lets simply put it like this: were in an ethical void where stealing or not stealing, selling or not selling, none of that matters and theres nothing good or bad about any of it. There are only people, art, and the decisions we make about what we think is good or valuable. It equal parts falls into place by nature and is designed, it is our unspoken set of rules. Paywalling content is bad or freeloading without contributing to the value of the community is bad, these are the types of things a culture decides on.

Community: the actual ebb and flow of those interactions. The person spoken too and the person speaking, the conversations and the spats and the dramas.

Ill suggest that art, and the sale of art, is inpart of value to the community. That buying art is an act of community engagement, of culture engagement. Of making tangible the feeling that youre not alone in your desires more so than just fapping to the desires themselves, in making tangible your desires so you can see and interact with them.

Buying art and supporting artists can be a way to communicate who you are and what you need to yourself.

… … …

On another subject. AI will become better but that only means artists will change. An artist is in the end a story teller. A person who has spent 20 years with a pencil may now have less tactile skill than a modeling program with artificially intelligent shaders that color correct for clarity and beauty… but a person who has worked for 20 years in modelling still creates finer images than others using thst AI.

There are also transferable skills between these items. First of all tactile skills. With 3d scanning a clay modeller can now create a 3d model. But also conceptual. How does the light focus a viewers attention on a locket, what is the story significance of that locket and how is it conveyed through the background and the character design? Computers atleast presently lack the social intelligence to place together a people driven story without atleast being given all the individual pieces, they certainly cant convey a story visually better than even most children. Not from scratch, not withiut great instruction and a library of preset data.

For atleast another decade, maybe 2, artists will exist. They will change, as they have always, but there will still be people of higher skill, craftsmanship, and conceptual understanding than others. These people will continue to be paid.

If its not artist, theyll be game designers. If games become easy to make, theyll be web designers. If all method of conveying story becomes so very simple a child could do it… well, a child can play a game but we still have lets players.

At such a point that art becomes obsolete, the world will be so significantly changed that its not a question of weather artists will be out of the job, but what jobs will become possible for them, what feats theyll reach and what tools theyll have to tell their stories. If it becomes true that theres no value to any stories they can tell…

Well thats a market saturated with creativity where I can freely experience anything. But I still want to experience it in a culture, with other people, and Ill throw down a little cash in the tip jar, at that point, of who ever creates a world with a community I want to be part of.

Well, thats what Id like, but I may also be thinking in that way for my own benefit, since Id like to be the one making that world. Might as well dream big, i guess.