How much AI is too much? Are you allowed to use Photoshop to create your digital art? Almost every tool there is now powered by AI in some way (some a lot more than others). Can you use its auto-fill button? What percent of the image can you use it for?

Can you generate something with AI and then manually edit it in Photoshop? How much manual editing is required before it's not considered AI anymore?

My point is, AI is another tool in the toolbox, it can be used well or poorly. How much is too much? Just like back in the day, using Photoshop wasn't allowed, until it was.

Where does one draw the line?

The art world is perfectly fine with "I know it when I see it" so I don't think these "gotcha" thought experiments really matter to it.

There’s two things to unpack here.

The first is that all “AI” is not equal. It’s specifically generative AI that most take issue with, mostly due to questionable ethics in training. Image editors have employed techniques marketed as “AI” for many years that are mostly or entirely unrelated to modern generative AI.

The second is that whether something is “AI art” is a spectrum, not binary. On one end you have creations in which generative AI played no role and on the other you have images that were generated off of nothing but a prompt or vague scribbles. In the middle you have things like images where the artist traced over an AI image or used bits and pieces of generated imagery. Probably the closest shorthand for where an image lands on the spectrum is to what degree the creator engaged their artistic skills.

A great many of digital artists would be happy to use Photoshop 7/CS1/CS2, all long predating generative AI, if those ran on modern operating systems. Some prefer modern simplistic (and without AI) tools like Paint Tool SAI.

For many of us, even if drawing that line exactly is debatable, a prompt-generated image, where the "artist" didn't interact with any of the pixels is across the line for "too much AI".

It can definitely take creativity and fortitude to get an AI model to draw what you want it to. But if you worked at a fantasy publishing house and commissioned a cover painting, it might take a fair amount of work for you to get the artist to create something in line with what you envisioned. But you wouldn't get artistic credit for the resultant painting; the artist would! If AI is creating the piece, it is the artist; and you're merely the commissioner of the work.

This argument resonates with me - but it's the same argument that has been made and artists have ignored or put up the same (unconvincing, in my opinion) arguments against the whole time. As you pointed out, this same discussion has been had every step of the way with digital art - from things like photoshop, to the tools that have been gradually introduced inside of photoshop and similar, to even things like brush packs, painting over kitbashes, etc. The traditionalist viewpoint holds strong, until the people arguing blink and realize everyone else eventually stopped caring and did what worked best for them.

At this point, I believe it's not a matter of intellectual honesty or actually disagreeing with any of it - it's just about outcomes. They don't want to see their work devalued, their sources of income drying up. It's an understandable fear. No one who enjoys the work they do enjoys the prospect of potentially having to change careers to keep making a living. Hell, most people that don't enjoy what they do have no desire to have to try and find a new career.

But humans are selfish. The same artists who are worried about technology taking their job will laud praise on technology in other areas that have eliminated jobs, with my recurring example being how happy they are for no longer having to pay a web dev to build them a portfolio site and can instead just go to squarespace and pay them a fraction of the cost. No one laments how there are basically no independent web designers building small sites anymore - it's just not a viable career. It's all been consolidated into shops working for big clients or pumping out themes for Wordpress, Squarespace, and Shopify. And of course, there are countless examples of this throughout history.

I'm not sure AI is going to be the great job destroyer we fear it is. I'm not sure it isn't, either. So I get it. This has a chance to force an issue on a massive scale that usually is much more limited in blast radius.

But to answer the question - I don't think it actually matters to them what the line is from any sort of rational perspective. It will move and shift based on the conversation to wherever they think it needs to be to protect themselves.

One possible line: can you actually copyright it?

A result of a prompt you can’t, I believe you can’t trace over a copyrighted work and claim it as your own either so I say that tracing over an AI generated image would not fly either. But IANAL so the details to be fleshed out. Also would probably break if one uses a model that is not trained on any copyrighted data.

It's not that deep, if someone thinks it's AI it loses value to them. If you're able to utilize AI tools in a way that doesn't make the output look like AI to the average person you'll be fine.

Eventually no one will be able to really tell the difference and all of this will go away (though likely at the expense of more people's livelihoods).

When does day becomes night?

Classic thought-stopping argument.