"Creating" with an AI is like an executive "inventing" the work actually done by their team of researchers. A team owner "winning" a game played by the their team.
That being said, AI output is very useful for brainstorming and exploring a creative space. The problem is when the brainstorming material is used for production.
Both things which were dismissed as not art at first but are widely accepted as an art medium nowadays.
There's a line to be drawn somewhere between artist and craftsperson. Creating beautiful things to a brief has always been a teachable skill, and now we're teaching it to machines. And, we've long sought to mass-produce beautiful things anyway. Think textiles, pottery, printmaking, architectural adornments.
Can AI replace an artist? Or is it just a new tool that can be used, as photography was, for either efficiency _or_ novel artistic expression?
AI cannot “democratize art” any more than the camera did, until the day it starts teaching artistry to its users.
It almost definitely can start teaching artistry to its users, and the same people who are mad in this thread will be mad that it's taking away jobs from art instructors.
The central problem is the same and it's what Marshall Brain predicted: If AI ushers in a world without scarcity of labor of all kinds, we're going to have to find a fundamentally new paradigm to allocate resources in a reasonably fair way because otherwise the world will just be like 6 billionaire tech executives, Donald Trump, and 8 billion impoverished unemployed paupers.
And no, "just stop doing AI" isn't an option, any more than "stop having nuclear weapons exist" was. Either we solve the problems, or a less scrupulous actor will be the only ones with the powerful AI, and they'll deploy it against us.
The work a camera does is capturing the image in front of the photographer. "Art" in the context of photography is the choice of what in the image should be in focus, the angle of the shot, the lighting. The camera just captures that; it doesn't create anything that isn't already there. So, not even remotely the same thing as AI Gen.
The work of Krita/Inkscape/etc (and technically even Photoshop) is to convert the artistic strokes into a digital version of how those strokes would appear if painted on a real medium using a real tool. It doesn't create anything that the artist isn't deliberately creating. So, not even remotely the same thing as AI Gen.
AI Gen, as demonstrated in the linked page and in the tool comparison, is doing all of the work of generating the image. The only work a human does is to select which of the generated images they like the best, which is not a creative act.
You could come up with your own story and direct the AI to generate it for you.
A film director is a creative. Ultimately, they are in charge of "visualizing" a screenplay": the setting, the the design of the set or the utilization of real locations, the staging of the actors within a scene, the "direction" of the actors (i.e., how they should act out dialog or a scene, lighting, the cinematography, the use of stunts, staging shots to accommodate the use of VFX, the editing (meaning, the actual footage that comprises the movie).
There's an old show on HBO, Project Greenlight, that demonstrates what a director does. They give 2 directors the same screenplay and budget and they make competing movies. The competing movies are always completely different...even though they scripts are the same. (In the most extreme example from one of the later seasons, one of the movies was a teen grossout comedy, and the competing movie was some sort of adult melodrama.)
2. Using AI can be can be an iterative process. Generate this scene, make this look like that, make it brighter colors, remove this, add this, etc. That's all carefully crafting the output. Now generate this second scene, make the transition this way, etc. I don't see how that's at all different from a director giving their commands to workers, except now you actually have more creative control (given AI gets good enough)
2. Current AI can't do what you're describing, so the biggest difference is that you're posing a hypothetical against the real world. But more specifically: the director already has a specific vision in their hand; the purpose of the "direction" is to bring this vision into reality within the scope of their budget and resources. With AI, you have a general idea and the AI creates its own vision and you pick what you like the best, until you ultimately realize the AI isn't going to get what you actually want and you settle for the best the AI can do for you. So, completely different.
That's what direction is though. Film directors prompt their actors and choose the results they like best (among many other commands to many other groups)
>You're selecting from the results it outputs, but you're not controlling the output.
The prompt controls the output (and I bet you'd have more control over the AI than you'd have over a drunk Marlon Brando)
This would include almost everyone who’s used any editing software more advanced than photoshop CS4.