An interesting perspective, I mostly agree with you. I don't like genAI, or rather what it's become synonymous with... The fast, cheap, cookie-cutter, everything-looks-the-same-now way of making things really appeals to people with no artistic sensibilities and that don't want to pay for assets. I also think a lot of (commonly chronically online) artists pay far too much attention to the «content theft» side of things (which I couldn't care less about) rather than the real issues with the practice, such as the mentioned environmental impact.
I'd be lying if I said AI-generated images/videos of old weren't deeply fascinating to me (nowadays they're commonly referred to as AI hallucinations, which I find to be simply inaccurate as machines aren't sentient, and even if they were how would they be able to perceive the world the same way we do?). But, the community surrounding these things aren't artists nor even art appreciators.
I once learned of an incredibly skilled artist that was once creating his own AI image generator from scratch based on his own images (I believe it was a glitch artist called Rui Martins, here's his Tumblr). My dad, a former graphic designer, had a lot of fun creating things with legacy Midjourney. Then the culture surrounding AI changed because it became mainstream.
I hope I'm making some sort of sense. Without being too much of a hipster, I feel that the only way to make generative AI not suck is to make it uncool, so I'm inclined to side with the «no AI» rule.
