Well, is Pixar’s Toy Story a work of art? Or what about Julia set renderings, where people make choices about the colors? ;)

Tongue-in-cheek aside, I do think I agree with you in that (1) art, as perceived by us human meatbags, is art because of the human element of it (if not in creation, then in perception), and that (2) AI absent explicit steering trends towards a rather bland medium.

But there’s art in everything from the blurry, out of focus, disposable film cameras, to a 5-year-old’s crayon scribble scrabbles, to the neon glitter themes we used to copy-paste over our geocities and xanga pages, and as frustrating as it is to our own sensibilities, an AI prompt “draw a pink elephant” isn’t all that different.

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slg 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

The element of creation is central to art. A painting or a photo of a sunset can be art, but the sunset itself is not art.

In addition, the communication doesn't need to be explicit or intentional. It can be communicating something antithetical to the artist's original intent like a blurry and out of focus photo. Or it can even be antithetical to the piece itself like a lot of modern art (Fountain[1] comes to mind). I'm also sure that the 5-year-old will happily tell you a story about why they scribbled what they did. I'm not diminishing any of those. But if all the person contributes is a prompt, the text of that prompt is the extent of their art.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fountain_(Duchamp)

	▲	Jare 2 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> a photo of a sunset can be art ... > But if all the person contributes is a prompt, the text of that prompt is the extent of their art. The natural question to pose is, does that mean that when the person who pressed the shutter button in that camera, that button press was the extent of their art? Of course not; intent, sensibility, timing, understanding there's something special about what's in front of you, preparing a composition, orchestrating poses, framing to create a special composition, manipulating the medium via speed or exposure or etc to create an appropriate texture... all those and more can play a part, and the button press is just the delivery method. Millions of photos per day are not art even if they show a pretty thing, and nobody has a problem with that. Even when we actively try to capture something special, most people will later look at their photo and say "it shows the place, but it doesn't communicate anything like what being there made me feel". So in the same way, I think the interesting discussion will be not that AI images are not art. Millions of prompts per day will not be art, and nobody (except grifters) has a problem with that. But how can AI become another vehicle for people to produce interesting art? Perhaps there's nothing special there. But I hope people with the drive to explore and the need to communicate continue giving it a shot and prove or disprove the notion that "it's just a prompt".
	▲	balamatom 2 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Is building a technofeudal entity and bootstrapping pseudo-AGI art?

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cal_dent 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

But it completely is different. To you point its why a 5 year old's crayon scribble is more powerful to certain people than Guernica for instance. History is littered with gazillions of scribbles, stray notes, meaningless stuff that just goes straight in the bin. AI will do that. But for something communicates the feeeell of something you need warmth and emotional relatability.