The premise here is that AI is generating art. That’s simply not true. People make art. AI is a tool not an artist. ‘AI art’ is art made by people using AI tools. The paintbrush doesn’t understand underlying meaning, it is a tool used by a person to create art. A diffusion model doesn’t understand meaning, but it also doesn’t create anything by itself. it is a tool that a person chooses to use.
The person chooses what to generate, what to manually create and how to mix those elements to create a composition that they, a human person, decide is what they want.
It’s no different than using Krita or Photoshop, with their various plugins and image manipulation capabilities (which also don’t understand meaning), to create art.
It’s just a tool, there is no ‘AI art’, it is all created by people.
If I throw a bucket of paint on a canvas and call it art. You can say that it is bad art, but saying that it is not art because the bucket of paint doesn’t understand art is nonsense. The same is true of any other tool that a person chooses to use to make art.
Gradually_Adjusting@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
Well, there’s a word for art that was made by someone using tools: art.
This has mainly not been what people use it for, and far more importantly such people aren’t even the target market. It’s exceedingly poor form to pretend otherwise.
FauxLiving@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
People use Photoshop to create cat memes and manipulate pictures of Vice President J. D. Vance but that doesn’t mean that the use of Photoshop disqualifies the output from being considered art. Even the cat pictures are art.
If a person decides they want to create an image in the style of a film that they love and they make something that fits their vision then who are we to say that it isn’t art? Do we have the right to examine their entire process to determine that they used only the tools that we approve of and only the methods that we approve of? Are they disqualified for using generative fill to fix some complex shading?
What if they generate a tree, is the rest of the piece now ‘Not Art’ because they used an AI tool?
That’s why this position against generative art doesn’t make any sense. The line you choose to draw between ‘Real Art’ and ‘Not Art’ is always going to be arbitrary and no two people will have the same definition.
I think this is a great example of people confusing their personal tastes with some universal truth about the world. "I don’t like art generated with AI tools’ is perfectly valid. But to simply declare that my personal taste is THE Definition of Art is hubris.