Luxury is sometimes artificial: diamonds, lobster, fashion… all are luxury because we decided to make them so.

Scarcity drives demand. When something is hard to get, (lobster is a good example, as it is not easy to transport and near impossible to farm away from the ocean) it becomes more desirable by the nature of its’ scarcity.

When a pretty image can be made by anyone at a computer with a few keystrokes, the value of ‘pretty’ goes down, while the value of ‘evocative’ or ‘communicative’ goes up… and these are things that, while a human can create in art almost instinctively, can only be made by AI art when a human spends significant time poring through the results and selecting high value images.

This may be the first example of “post scarcity” that we as humans have to deal with, and figuring out how to do that is going to be a good roadmap for the future… or we can watch just how badly we screw it up.