People calling themselves artists and designers by using AI generative tools is just rich.
It's still not real art. It's something an AI made in response by typed words fueled by zero creative expression with the closest thing to creative expression being the images that were stolen in order to generate a new one. Period.
It's easy to strawman this stuff as
push button, receive "art", especially since it literally can be that simple. But I wonder what folks make of grey areas like this:
View: https://streamable.com/h90d7j
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Set aside questions of aesthetics for this particular image and consider the general process. While most of the end result is AI-generated, there's clearly a lot of creative control being exercised -- hand-drawing the underlying forms, iterating and curating the best versions of each element, significant amounts of collating, blending, color correction, and hand-drawn edits. Is the person behind this video an "artist"? Is this "art"? If not, what distinguishes it from traditional collage or dƩcoupage or found poetry or musique concrete or patchwork quilting, all of which use pre-existing materials in a similar way but with even less fine-grained control? As for ownership,
Dadaist cut-ups and similar long-recognized art forms often remix copyrighted text and images, and much more directly than the indirect theft-by-training these models are accused of.
Personally I see it as a sliding scale of creative control, with entirely hand-made art at the "purest" tier, versus 100% prompt-driven image generation on the low end of the spectrum alongside stuff like commissioning custom art or taking an amateur snapshot of nature (or anything else you didn't make yourself). Mixed-media, processed/professional photography,
generative art (in the old school sense), and heavily customized AI art are somewhere in between. But any level of human input into the end result qualifies as art, IMHO, even if it's mediocre/uninspired/meh. As these tools mature and grow more versatile, the division between traditional art and AI art will only blur further.
Ironically, some future improvement on this tech -- say one that lets you
directly capture what you imagine in your head -- could arguably be the "purest" form of artistic expression since it would functionally remove all barriers between what the artist envisions and what the audience experiences. (Maybe topped only by some crazy-ass mind-melding sci-fi tech, but then AI image generation was pretty much in the same category just a few years ago.)