If you compare this scenario to photography and art, it's pretty clear you've not actually participated in that community
I was comparing this to when photography first came onto the scene not today, but I'm tired of the gatekeeping (which you retreated back into) which says this isn't art when as with every creative process, it is derivative and creative.
People already splice together videos of generated clips. Is that not creative? It's just gatekeeping. People in a few years (or already) or in a generation won't be this pedantic about it.
You're using your definition of "creative" and "art" interchangeably, which lacks nuance and respect for art. The reference to the arrival of photography similarly lacks nuance and respect for artists and art.
Art and creativity have a human element, they evoke emotions. As soon as you delegate the process to an LLM, you've disrespected that human element if you try to pass it off as creative or art. You can call it "gatekeeping" if you want to, but I see it as basic respect for other humans and human imagination and effort.
If somebody spends hours prompting various resources and curating it, is that then "slop"? I don't think it is, it's just as sustained a creative effort, regardless of the tool used. You are saying that the 10-20 minute clips that people have put together of generated vid of various series (like Star Wars) isn't art? There are entire stories told using this method. It's not art?
> If somebody spends hours prompting various resources and curating it, is that then "slop"?
In my opinion, yes. Some people may disagree with the term "slop" in this case, but that does not step it all the way up to "art". It can still be non-slop, non-art.
You're right, I don't gatekeep art that same way. I don't lack respect for art, I lack respect for your standards which I think are artificial.
Someone that pretends prompting is "effort" will always just be that, regardless of how you, personally, set your standards.
Don't you see how this can be said for your feelings about AI art?
Everything you're saying about AI art, someone once said about some other emergent art form. Photography, CGI, digital illustration, synthetic music... with just as much conviction as you're displaying here. But you'd agree those other things have become artforms, yes?
To preempt the typical retort "Yeah but in those cases humans put in some extra X" okay why can't humans put in some extra X while using AI as a tool as well?
You're also making an assumption that AI's acceptance WILL follow, just because the others were later accepted. You can't make that assumption at all.
Neither of these arguments are in good faith.
But a meaningful discussion requires good faith, not dismissal to disingenuous argument.
Whatever definition you bring into scope will not resolve it because a colloquial definition only describes how a word is commonly used, and doesn't establish rule for every disputed case, which is what we have here.
Definitions are generally not normative, but even if we agreed on one, it would not exclude a works solely because of the tool used to produce it. But you are saying that every work produced using AI is illegitimate as art, regardless of its intention, composition, context, expressive content, or any other quality ordinarily associated with art.
What necessary property does accepted art possess that no AI-assisted work could possibly possess? Or to state it another way closer to my original question (which was not disengenuous), what additional human contribution makes photography or CGI art, and why couldn’t an AI-assisted process contain that contribution?
Until that property is identified, saying AI images cannot be art is largely just a stated conclusion.
Instead, you did not engage with this concept until now and relied on logical fallacy. When I pointed this out, you did not revise or adapt to show good faith, but decided to pivot to falsely classifying the discussion as just a matter of my opinion with no merit. Now we're finally circling back.
There are a number of necessary qualities missing in AI works to qualify as "art". Let's take photography, as an example. In photography, the camera captures the images for a human, but the "art" is the unique (original), intentional depiction of the scene that captures the artist's perspective. Art conveys the artist's thoughts to others. This is true of CGI as well. It is still the artist using their skills to provide a unique perspective in a digitized world.
AI works lack these qualities. It is impossible to create unique AI art - it isz at best, a collection of derivative parts. Sometimes art is intentionally derivative, yes, but that leads to the next point. AI art cannot carry intentionality that art can. It carries a distillation of intention, tokenizing and associating the intention back to its training set. It disconnects the prompt author from the output in a definitionally important way. It is randomized, not reproducible. It is an approximation of the prompter's thoughts, ideas, and emotions - not a translation. It cannot reflect the human experience in its output, just a statistical guess at them.
> saying AI images cannot be art is largely just a stated conclusion.
Yes, it's called a thesis. I have one, I've stated it, and I've supported it. You're welcome to contribute to the discussion