I mostly agree with your sentiment, but saying "math is not art" is the same as saying "writing is not art". Calculation isn't art. But math isn't calculation. Math is a social activity shared between humans. Like writing, much of it is purely utilitarian. But there's always an aesthetic component, and some works explore that without regard to utility. It's a funny kind of art, accessible to few and beautiful to even fewer. But there is an art there.

The vast majority of artists in all fields don't really have their own style and are just copying other people's. Doesn't matter whether we're talking about art, literature, music, film, whatever.

It takes a rare genius to make a new style, and they come along a few times a generation. And even they will often admit they built on top of existing styles and other artists.

I'm not a fan of AI work or anything, but we need to be honest about what human 'creativity' usually is, which for most artists is basically copying the trends of the time with at most a minor twist.

OTOH, I think when you start entering the fringes of AI work you really start seeing how much it's just stealing other people's work though. With more niche subjects, it will often produce copies of the few artists in that field with a few minor, often bad, changes.

Defining art in this way is like defining intelligence as the possession of a degree from Stanford. It's just branding.

Art shouldn't make you feel comfortable and safe. It should provoke you and in this sense AI art is doing the job better than traditional art at the moment here.

Other than the technological aspect, there's nothing new under the sun here. And at its very worst, AI art is just Andy Warhol at hyperscale.

https://wbpopphilosopher.wordpress.com/2023/05/07/andy-warho...

You may check these videos by Oleg Kuvaev. 100% generated using AI. Everything: text, music, characters, voices, editing -- all done via prompts, using multiple engines (I think he mentioned about a dozen services involved). I would not call it "high art", but it's definitely not a slop, it's an artist skillfully using AI as a tool.

https://youtu.be/A2H62x_-k5Q?si=EHq5Y4KCzBfo0tfm

https://youtu.be/rzCpT_S536c?si=pxiDY4TPhF_YLfRc

https://youtu.be/wPVe365vpCc?si=AqhpaZHYb4ldSf3F

https://youtu.be/EBaGqojNJfc?si=1CoLn4oeNxK-7bpe

> I don't believe that there is near enough room for creativity to shine through in the prompt-generation pipeline

I mean you are building a prompt and tweaking it. I mean even if you didn't do that you could still argue that finding it is in itself a creative akin to found art [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Found_object

How much room for creativity is there with a camera? Angle, lighting, F-stop, film type, film processing? I have a local image generator app called Draw Things that has many times more options than this.

Early synthesizers weren't that versatile either. Bands like Pink Floyd actually got into electronics and tore them apart and hacked them. Early techno and hip-hop artists did similar things and even figured out how to transform a simple record player into a musical instrument by hopping the needle around and scratching records back and forth with tremendous skill.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NnRVmiqm84k

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekgpZag6xyQ

Serious AI artists will start tearing apart open models and changing how they work internally. They'll learn the math and how they work just like a serious photographer could tell you all about film emulsions and developing processes and how film reacts to light.

Art's never about what it does. It's about what it can do.

I don't believe that there is near enough room for creativity to shine through in the prompt-generation pipeline

You seem so sure that you'll always be able to tell what you're looking at, and whether it's the result of prompting or some unspecified but doubtlessly-noble act of "creativity."

LOL. Not much else can be said, but... LOL.

So art is just a status signifier? "This is hard to make so I must be really special"?

Just like photography

For fun I decided to try out the find and replace on this comment

> Sorry... It's all slop buddy. The medium is the message, and photography's message is "I want it cheap and with low effort, and I don't care too much about how it looks"

Hmm... it seems like you have failed to actually make an argument here

What a barren viewpoint.

The logical implication of your view is that if someone or something has a halo, they can shit in your mouth and it's "good." The medium is the message, after all.

This is the same pretentious art bullshit that regular people fucking hate, just repackaged to take advantage of public rage at tech bro billionaires.

Whatever, man, this guy isn't wrong. Look at the example he gave how a camera made it so that anyone could do what only a few could. Novel art is just a candid shot now. It forced art to completely change its values. Much of the same will happen now. The difference is that with the past, we still needed artists to take advantage of them while now, it all can be completely automated. It's disgusting but I'm sure purest thought the same of every innovation.