So from my perspective, I think it's a fad that'll die out or ultimately be abused, just like everything other machine learning toolset out there. But who knows? Humans and fads can remain irrational longer than I can stay solvent.
It was previously, because we were the only ones capable of it. As a counter-point, it's not hard to imagine aliens creating art.
The definition that specifies human origin is now outdated.
And rather than calling the definition of art outdated, it makes more sense to call this machine learning generation stuff "artificial art" or "superficial art" or some other separate term. It doesn't make sense to mix two rather incompatible concepts.
Actually I would say most of it is, since humans can produce bad art as well.
You're worried about the process, and I get that. But the result is art.
“AI” as we know it does not exist without humans pushing it forward; romantic notions our inventions are independently sentient depends on ignoring a whole lot.
For the same reason I can choose to not import a religion I can not import the idea these stupid things are “thinking” independently of humans, without justifying it as I don’t have to with religion as well.
All the constraints are defined by us. It’s not magic.
As a pretty handy example, photographers are considered artists. I took photography pretty seriously at one time, and it's very dear to me, but I will say that I don't think there's very much magic in it.
I don't think the algo is thinking or sentient or anything like that. It's hard to argue that it's not producing art, though.
Tangent: I would also argue humans are designed. I don't mean any mysticism: I think all life is being designed by unthinking processes. As evidence, just look at all the specialist life-forms that are filling a niche that they were...well, designed for.
That said, if people want to wax poetic privately in their own jargon, whatever, of course. That’s democracy.
But the refined over thousands of years corpus of knowledge “contained” within STEM fields has been shown over and over to be our most reliable guide humans have come up with for building a society. Nothing in there attempts to define what is and isn’t intelligence; it’s a model of what matter exists and how it coalesces at various “speeds” relative to light. Needing to define if AI is this or that is a romantic human thing; very subjective.
Where a physical thing “is” is hard to argue. Where a thing fits into ones subjective mental taxonomy is easy to argue.
Ultimately, is "thinking" not simply prompting your own brain with information(often times natural language) and see what the output is and then we fine tune?
Maybe a question to ask is, can you express yourself if you are not creating the canvas/paint brush? Or, is the Lego creation a form of expression if you are not making the Lego pieces!?