Or maybe an accessibility improvement. You don't need to practice creating your own works of art over many years anymore, or have enough money to commission a master artist. The AI artists are good enough and work for cheap.

I'm not saying that it's a shift in nature? All I've been saying is:

A) tools to create realistic nudes have been publicly available ever since deepfakes became a thing

B) deepfakes are worse than traditional photoshopped nudes because (as you put it, a quality improvement) they're more convincing and therefore can have more detrimental effects

The difference is that we now can do video. I mean in principle that was possible before but also a hell of a lot of work. Making it look real hasn't been a problem since before Photoshop, if anything people get sloppy with AI also because a felt 99% of people who use AI don't have an artistic bone in their body.