its easier than ever to produce and share art

Anyone who believes the transition from pencils and paper to high end computers and software has made art creation easier... Go compare the staff and budget required for the original Disney's Snow White relative to the latest Pixar film.

And as to sharing, that's where AI is extra obnoxious. On the one hand, you're trying to make yourself heard in a wholly artificial cacophony of procedural generated spam. And the current iteration of The Algorithm favors AI, so even your hack favorites like Ben Garrison and Jon McNaughton have to compete with Shrimp Jesus.

It’s not a bad thing, we can create whatever art we want with ease

You cannot. You can make requests to a computer and it can approximate a result that you accept or reject. But you're not making art, any more than walking up to a sketch artist, slapping down a $20, and saying "Draw a picture of me looking silly" is making art.

Let’s not paint that positive reality like a bad thing.

When the future of art is just a computer pumping out caricatures, because its cheaper than commissioning anyone with talent and experience to employ perspective or creativity or even just something beyond the sixteen pre-defined style choices, that's pretty bleak.

Yes but the question is whether it's imagined newly by a human, or it comes from an algorithm that only works because it's combining other people's existing works.

Tablets and software made things easier for humans, AI just... Makes artists obsolete and if you do create something new, it'll be ingested too.

I agree with you in the core principle that less work for more productivity is good, but I feel creative work is the one notable exception. We remember a bunch of paintings from centuries ago not because they're beautiful to look at even, but because these particular artists have found interesting new ways to convey their view of the world or their feelings. AI generating a new version of a Van Gogh painting isn't as impressive.

Ghibli movies, similarly, have a distinctive art style that reminds you of how these movies have been lovingly made by dedicated artists who poured their souls into it. Using AI to shit out random content with the same style is just blatant disrespect for everything they've done. You can use AI to clone paw patrol or something if you want. That's a merch seller, not art.