Press a button on a box you barely understand and the camera shits out a pic. "Hey I make art". What a sad state of affair, tech is consuming everything and people are cheering, one more step on the path to being complete useless key pressers.
You can tell that right away seeing how many camera users never produce anything of quality. A 6 years old can press the button of a camera but no 6 years old will produce meaningful work. In the case of Ai art tools you just need some basic english skills
You still have to select the 2 AI jpegs out of the 15, that's the artistic part.
> it's still incredibly more complex than "hey google draw me a horse with a tuxedo"
And just like taking a photo of a random horse in a field you'll mostly get a pretty bland result.
You can argue it's simpler to create art with, which is an odd complaint, but if you're not working to make something great you generally won't get it - just like photography is much simpler than painting as it's "just press a button".
I think this is an oversimplification.
There was a recent write up by a guy who used DALL-E to create his logo for his open source project. What was clear from that writeup is that it is still a process for getting exactly the look that one is aiming to achieve. Even with an AI, there are different styles, decisions, choices, and visual representations that have to be made.
Your position that with photography, you have to "chose a subject, lights, &c" doesn't change with AI generated artwork; one still has to describe the subject, color scheme, visual style, composition details, etc. for the AI to generate the image. Except that instead of composing a scene with makeup, props, and subjects, you do it textually.
I'd say that in some respect, it is far more "creative" than photography because it removes physical and real-world constraints from the artist which would otherwise require knowledge of CGI and digital tools.
> A 6 years old can press the button of a camera but no 6 years old will produce meaningful work
This is also true of even painting. Even a 6 year old can grab a paintbrush and paint without producing meaningful work. So that does not change with AI generated artwork. Yes, a 6 year old can describe a scene to an AI that generates some image -- just as a 6 year old can pick up a brush and apply paint to a canvas, but the likeliness of a 6 year old presenting the seed/input that the AI needs to generate something unique and of visual interest/originality is low just as it is with a paintbrush.
One of the truly fascinating things with stable diffusion is that you can use a starting image. So you can start with a vague sketch to control the composition. It's quite incredible.
Also if you are doing something interesting with digital photography it is definitely not just pressing a button.
At worst the complaint seems to be "with care you can more easily create good art" which is a very odd complaint.