The person you responded to seems pretty content, saying it sucks is you projecting.

> You could argue that AI has almost nothing but taste

But then you could argue that it has nothing but trained taste, and isn't creative. Then somebody could ask what you mean by that, and you could throw up your hands and say "I don't know", which is the decent thing to do, because none of us know, but it means something.

It isn't about the merits of the output, except that there are some creative outputs that it won't produce. But we can't formally describe those, because they're creative. They're all different, they have different qualities, there's no formula, and you don't get there by training. Once you "get there" you have to get there again, which is to say, keep being creative. This process can be mediated by actually daubing actual paint around.

>We've automated taste well enough for most production needs, and its only going to get better over time. If you don't think it'll be good enough for artistic needs too, you're placing a pretty hard bet against AI.

It's not about placing bets on the ability of AI.

"Taste" can also include the human behind the piece. For example, I love listening to black metal. My "taste" as a consumer of black metal includes sombre atmospheres, oppressive walls of noise, dissonant, angular rhythmic guitar sections, etc.

But my "taste" in black metal extends to the artists behind the music. Black metal has a huge issue with racism and white supremacy. There is a lot of sonically interesting music made by hateful individuals in the black metal scene that I don't listen to because the artists values are antithetical to my own.

In a similar manner, art made primarily through generative AI may technically resemble art that normally matches my "taste", but I find myself wholly uninterested in it because the artists behind it have values that are antithetical to my own.

PS: I'm not trying to say "AI artists = nazis". I'm trying to say that your own motivations and world view behind the art you create influence whether I'll engage with it or not.

Being able to rapidly prototype concepts might help people get good at it, in a sort of I know it when I see it and need to explore, kind of way.

Here's a general principle: non-participants can have opinions about our thing (whatever thing that is). If they trot out the same naive dumb lines of thought over and over, and we can't put into words why they're wrong, that's a regrettable failure of discussion, but it's nobody's fault, and they should continue with their aggravating droning until we actually get our act together and find something effective to say in reply.

Art is for everyone and everyone can have an opinion on it. Dont be so elitist.

Yes I agree, you should try generating your own custom AI assisted art. You might be surprised by the enjoyment you get out of manifesting a vision in your head that you could not have produced before.

This is the kind of argument people make about furniture vs ikea and human made watches. This is not mastery, its just hobby/art. Human excellence is in abundance, not in raw dogging the most artistic Java class.

You could've made the same argument at any time in history because all technologies do the same thing. Things will go on, mastery will remain.

It doesn't make all people's lives worse. It makes those people's lives worse that think their job (now redundant) was an artistic endeavour. The rest of the world gets cheaper things at affordable prices.