To a certain extent, your argument is mitigated by considering the cumulative effort of learning to produce art, AKA "knowing where to hammer", AKA "it took a lot of hard work to make this look easy".
In fact, since AI is trained on a much bigger data set than humans, AI art is in fact higher-effort than human-made art (and therefore, according to the GP, more interesting).
We loosely apply this as a premise for intellectual property rights, but it's contingent on the state being the referee - and many cases have ended in rights being taken away from inventors because someone else worked the legal system to take it away.
In the case of generative training data, it's largely being used as a commons resource. The more you are inclined towards labor theory of property, the more it "feels like" theft, because the original laborer would be credited as owner - the labor of the machine is derivative of that labor, and largely non-transformative since it results in imagery resembling the original, versus metadata, statistics, etc.
Labor theory of property has many philosophical issues, as outlined with the "monkey selfie" case:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disp...
But that is what webmaven was proposing. "your argument is mitigated by considering the cumulative effort of learning to produce art"
So do you count the training and practice a human and the AI took in order to be able to produce the art, or do you not count either of them?
Do you subscribe to the view that effort is what makes art valuable?
A master painter paints an amazing portrait with a few brush strokes in 10 minutes. A teenager creates a matchstick cathedral by working extremely diligently for 2 years. Do you think that the matchstick cathedral is more artistic than the portrait?
If you say yes to the first, and no to the second then there is a seeming contradiction. Because clearly more effort went into the years to cut matchsticks than the minutes to draw the portrait. To resolve this seeming contradiction webmaven proposed that we should count the hours spent acquiring the skill. The master spent a lifetime drawing and painting until he got good enough to capture the essence of someone with a few brush strokes. Are you agreeing with that argument? If yes, why does it not apply to an AI? If not how do you resolve the contradiction?
> I don't think either of those count because they're not art-specific.
The training of a neural network is very art specific. It looks at art. It creates, gets criticised, creates again on repeat.
Don't get me wrong. I don't think the AI is more artistic just because it encapsulates more effort. I think the mistake is that effort is not what makes art valuable. It is not a pineapple pooping competition. Emotional impact is what makes art art in my opinion. (Which is a different question from what makes art have monetary value.)
Edit: I decided to add my two cents about using time spent as a measure of effort. I think this can be misleading and I have a counterexample, although admittedly it isn't from art: think about an athlete running 100 meters. This doesn't require effort just in the training before, but also in the act itself. And the less time the athele takes to run 100 meters, the more is the effort required.
As for my own opinion about art, I think that anything could be art: what counts is the idea behind it. How this translates to this specific problem of AI generated images I'm unsure though, as it would, at least in part, depend on how much of your idea you can convey through a ML model.
Not as a hard rule, no, although there is absolutely art where the effort to produce it is an inherent part of the value of it.
> Do you think that the matchstick cathedral is more artistic than the portrait?
No, not because of effort involved, anyway. If both things are trying to convey something about the human experience, they're both equally "artistic".
I subscribe to the view that what makes art valuable is that it communicates something human that can't be communicated well otherwise[1].
This is why if there existed an AI that produced art all by itself, I would consider the work produced to be pretty pictures, not art. An artist using AI as a tool to produce human communication, though? Totally art.
> (Which is a different question from what makes art have monetary value.)
I agree. The price tag of a thing says nothing about its artistic value. It only speaks to commercial value.
[1] This is also why I don't think there is any such thing as "bad art". Art can be successful or unsuccessful, but "bad" and "good" are subjective aesthetic judgements. When people say art is "bad", what they mean is it's art they dislike.