Did mass production really replace craftmanship? Are nowadays less crafters and artisans in the world?

>Most of us live in fairly repetitive, predictable and derivative ways

Wasn't this also true in the past? What was original about laboring the fields? I imagine nowadays we have more diverse lifes in average, than the average man in the past.

>where it becomes increasingly difficult to find original thought or expression of ideas.

is it? Even if you deliberately go look for them in places like libraries and such? Maybe social media simply isn't meant for that.

>We are, statistically speaking, mostly repetition

That's an interesting debate. Yours is an uncommon position in this sub, because instead of arguing that AI art is unoriginal, you seem to be arguing that humans themselves are as unoriginal as AI. I think people does more than copy-pasting. I think they are able to come up with new ideas by looking at old ones, otherwise society wouldn't have evolved. AIs might be less capable of truly original ideas, but I think they eventually will, and that they do not need to reach that point in order to be extremely useful and produce beautiful images or stories, be them art or not.

>While today we can appreciate and value the effort and creativity of a music artist, very soon more and more music will be synthesized, and in doing so we will value it less

If you think people will actually give less value to machine generated stuff, wouldn't that maintain or even increase a demand for human-made stuff, therefore keeping that activity safe? Yeah, I think that's what you're saying later.

>There will be fewer human artists and craftsmen if there are fewer ways to earn a living

It might be harder to make a living out of art, but that doesn't necessarily mean artists will become more scarse. Maybe more will be able to do it as a hobbie.