I don’t see these grants or public funding ever covering a private company for one.
Companies are by far the largest recipients of public funding for art in many countries and sectors. Especially for e.g. movie production in smaller languages, but also in other sectors.
And for two, I don’t see AI art ever actually getting to the point where it fully replaces artists.
I do agree it won’t fully replace artists, but not because it won’t get to the point where it can be better than everyone, but because a huge part of art is provenance. A “better Mona Lisa” isn’t worth anything, while the original is priceless, not because a “better” one isn’t possible, but because it’s not painted by Da Vinci.
But that will only help an even narrower sliver than the artists who are making good money today.
It will take time, but AI will eat far more fields than art, and we haven’t even started to see the fallout yet.
Because it is trained to make a homogeneous rendering of what you are looking for
Diffusion models are not trained “for” anything other than matching vectors to denoising to within your own tolerance levels of matching to what you are looking for. Accordingly, you’ll see a whole swathe of models tuned on more specific types of imagery, and tooling to more precisely control what they generate. The “basic” web interfaces are just scratching the surface of what you can do with e.g. Controlnet and the like. It will take time before they get good enough, sure. They are also only 2 years old, and people have only been working on tooling around then for much less than that.
Open AI might be sitting on Microsoft money, but how many other companies has Microsoft gobbled up over the years? Open AI if it starts to struggle will just fall under the Microsoft umbrella and become part of its massive conglomerate, integrated into it. Where are our AR goggles that we are supposed to all be wearing, Microsoft and Google both had those? So many projects grow and die with multiple millions thrown at them. All end up with crazy valuations based on future consumer usage. As we all can’t even afford rent.
OpenAI is just one of many in this space already. They are in the lead for LLMs, that is text-based models. But even that lead is rapidly eroding. They don’t have any obvious lead for diffusion models for images. Having used several, it was first with the recent release of DallE 3 that it got “good enough” to be competitive.
At the same time there are now open models getting close enough to be useful, so even if every AI startup in the world collapsed this won’t go away.
There is also this idea that people wouldn’t willing contribute if just asked.
That’s fine, but that doesn’t fix the financial challenge.