In a post-scarcity solarpunk future, I could imagine some reasonable uses, but that’s not the world we’re living in yet.
AI art has already poisoned the creative environment. I commissioned an artist for my latest solarpunk novel, and they used AI without telling me. I had to scrap that illustration. Then the next person I tried to hire claimed they could do the work without AI but in fact they could not.
All that is to say, fuck generative AI and fuck capitalism!
But that's specific to universities as institutions, not art as a concept. There are plenty of artists without formal education that got inspiration from the things we saw. We could have a discussion about how internet scrapers get their data, however that's a different conversation. AI art isn't stealing content, it's using existing content (in albeit questionable ways) to generate new and unique content.
The difference between generative AI and human created works is that a human can create something with little to no input whatsoever from someone or something else. Blind/deaf people have created things. The AI cannot create something without its training data and the people who created that data didn't authorise it's use. They get no credit or monitary or otherwise re-imbursement or compensation for the use of their IP. But that IP is being used to make money. How do you not see that as a violation?
Art as a concept is agreed to be only created by human input. We aren't talking about inspiration here because that's not what this is. Because the AI isn't being inspired. Because it can't create anything at all without the training data. It would literally be nothing without it. It would generate nothing without it. You as a human being can create things without input. You don't need to see the work of other artists in order to create something. Therefore, you hone skills using the input of others but you as a person could always put pen to paper or paint to cave wall and simply make something. The AI can't. Therefore the claim that it is creating is wrong.