People are already creating more art than we actually need (witness how hard it is to make a living as an artist). Now just wait till the AIs become serious competition at that too.
The amount of money someone can make in our economy as an artist isn't a reflection of how much art we "need." Art in particular is not a commodity that society can just have enough of. And in general, the price something fetches in our economy isn't always a reflection of its value to society. See: salaries of social workers, emergency medical technicians, etc.
Everything, including art, follows supply and demand. Value is the point where they meet. Salaries of social works and EMTs are where the supply of those positions meet the need for those positions in any certain area.
Art has a defined supply and demand, where the supply is high and demand is low (probably due to the fact you can buy copies of famous masterpieces for very cheap).
> Everything, including art, follows supply and demand.
It isn't about supply and demand, it's about transaction costs.
Suppose you could create a work of art that fifty million people would each value at 25c, so total value of two million dollars. Far more than enough to pay your wages for a year. But if you actually try to charge them, the credit card company wants 30c + 3% per person (consuming more than the entire value) and other payment mechanisms suffer similarly infeasible costs in money or inconvenience or otherwise.
But if we would pay the artist unconditionally and then they create art and give it away, we would get two million dollars worth of art for $12,000 and with no transaction costs.
Meanwhile this allows some of the artists to become famous and then charge prices for their art that exceed the transaction costs, and now they're paying taxes and funding the UBI for the next generation of artists/inventors/experimentalists/etc.
> What happens when a competitor creates a substitute artwork (i.e. one that competes for market share with the original artwork) and sells it at 24¢?
Price and value aren't the same thing, that's part of the problem.
Suppose in response to competition the original artist would lower the price to 24c. The customer still gets the same value as before but is paying less. The customer gets 1c more of the surplus and the artist gets 1c less.
But the total surplus is still the same. The benefit the customer gets from having the art hasn't gone down, only the price.
Where this gets weird is displacement. Suppose competing art appears and now half the customers will choose the other art instead, and the customers only have time for one piece of art. Now the original art has lost half its total value because there are half as many people with it, regardless of what price was paid.
Which means it is possible to have "enough" art and more would be too much -- when you have so much that people are too busy with existing art for enough of them to choose the new art to justify its creation. But that point is well past what transaction costs will allow if payment has to be made per-customer via an ugly hack like copyright.
It may even be past the point where there is "too much" art/science/software, because you can justify over-producing a lot of junk if the result is even one more Andy Warhol or Albert Einstein or Alan Turing.
And obviously to total $2M at 25c requires 8M customers rather than 50M if you actually divide by .25 instead of multiplying by 25, so that's even easier.
While in theory art would be efficiently transferred from the ideal seller (artist) to ideal buyer (rich #1 fan), in practice the idea that information falls in the right hands automagically is kinda laughable
Once ai starts making better art than humans it might be able to improve itself better than humans as well. At that point we don't need humans either. Still nice to keep us around though.
