> Meaningful art is not mass-produced, generated content.

Andy Warhol might disagree [1] (:

(I realize that's not exactly apples-to-apples, but y'know.)

Or there's "art is anything you can get away with," which I just mention to point out that this kind of issue ("what is art?") is not new. In some ways it seems like a good thing to get people, like you, riled up about these topics, arguing the merits of their point of view. That's how culture happens.

It's an interesting question you tangle with: is it art because of what the artist did, or is it art because of how the viewer/listener/etc receives it? Some of both? How much of each? If you encountered some art but you didn't know its provenance, and it had some emotional impact on you, would it still be art if you found out later it was 100% AI generated?

Like you say, it's all subjective, but it's nice to see random people on the internet talking about the nature of art, since it's something I care about too.

So in other words, thank you for being angry (:

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campbell%27s_Soup_Cans "... what Time magazine called the 'Slice of Cake School'—artists who treated the banal artifacts of contemporary civilization as legitimate subjects for high art"

That one took me back to high school art history. Agree, as much as I dislike AI generated art, it still is art. An Andy Warhol of today would could be making his screenprints using AI.

You really can't say, 'art should be this', 'art isn't that'. It's just art, it is what it is, people have a lot of emotions wrapped up in the art they like but it simply is what it is.

I don't think that example applies at all here. The quote you quoted itself said it - "subjects for high art". Theres a difference between treating the banalities of life as SUBJECTS for your art and making human, non-mass produced art from that ( like the paining you linked) vs just treating the soup cans themselves as art.

At least that's my interpretation of it

In these discussions, the concept of perceiving content gets intertwined with how content was made, because artists and creatives are usually more interested in how something was made.

So unless these two concepts are separated, people will endlessly talk past each other assuming both sides hold the same fundamental beliefs.

Claiming you made something by yourself, when in reality someone else made it (AI) is easy to frown upon.

I think if you can have a positive experience from looking at a sunset, hearing birds sing, etc, it should technically be possible to have a positive experience from the outputs of an AI without human input. This assumes art is clearly defined as needing to be made by a human with some effort, which neither a sunset or AI outputs are.

In practice, people who use AI to make content give it some direction. The amount of guidance varies wildly, and in practice the majority of what we see is minimal involvement.