DALL-E is the disposable camera of AI images. There are plenty of artists working with more complex tool chains that take lots of effort and energy to create, and form their own type of AI art.
Yes, photography was similar in how it overwhelmed painting, but the difference is that photography, from day one, offered a gloriously rich set of tools for making pictures while DALL-E is a peg-board toddler toy by comparison and the results speak for themselves. Just compare the first few years of photography to the middling pablum we have that's spit out from these generative AI models. Despite the models stealing the entire history of world art and putting all of that at the fingertips of untrained artists, the results are still embarrassingly naive and mostly boring. The reason is that art isn't about the tools, it's about the mind and people with no training and no experience in art cannot make consistently good art without training, even with tools that let them create sophisticated collages of other people's real art.
Low quality photography is not elevated to the status of art. Low quality AI generations are not elevated to the status of art.
The actual art will be made by people with something to say or show and it will take energy and effort - it won’t be made by typing your idea into DALL-E, it’ll happen with complex workflows on fine-tuned models.
It is just another tool with different strengths, weaknesses, and constraints.
I'm not convinced that this is what will happen long-term, but if it is, I'd completely agree that it's a new art form.
E.g. my son loves art, but gets exasperated at anything remotely abstract. Part of my enjoyment of taking him to art exhibitions is things like when he walked past a Picasso with a look of utter disdain and loud audible huff. Or the conversations we had about Matisse's sculptures, or the paper cutouts from his later years.
(I don't really like Matisse either - the thing I enjoy most of the visual experiences of the Matisse museum in Nice is the olive garden, despite the total lack of intent behind how the tree-branches grow)
My son is 14 now, and draws plenty of things I enjoy for their actual appearance, but I know most of them are scribbles or practice to him, and I don't try to analyze them for intent that I know usually isn't there.
Meanwhile, two of his pictures from when he was smaller that I know he did with intent, because he told us, and we wrote it down, are scribbles to me.
Shapeless blobs.
One of them I quite enjoy on a visual level, but while to him it was a fox, to me it is a red swirl that while visually pleasing in no way is anything like a fox.
While I wouldn't have it on the wall if it wasn't my son's, his intent behind it does not make it better.
The other is hideous, but his intent was to paint his mum and me, abd so I love it.
For that one the intent is what gives it value to me. That is a rare exception.
But only because he told us, and because of the emotional value of that.
He could've given us any random painting and said the same thing, and it's value would be the same. The "art" in that instance was his statement.
I also know from discussing his drawings with him, that whether he enjoyed a given drawing or I enjoyed seeing it, often correlates poorly - many of his that I enjoy are things he dismisses completely for reasons that does not affect my enjoyment of them at all.
It's good the kids know...