this post was submitted on 03 Nov 2025
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Art is beautiful not because economic value has been captured and skewered into aesthetics. It is a part of being human.
Yea, I agree. It is like the anti-ai art luddites don't understand this... The people making the promps are still making art, just by the nature of it being humans making human decisions. Skill isn't a gate to art in the same way anymore, despite what the gatekeepers want everyone to believe.
Okay, I'm willing to accept that we generally shouldn't decide that our personal lines in the sand can serve as meaningful differentiators between art and not-art. By the same token, don't expect me to be particularly impressed by a (mostly) photorealistic composition just because you spent 30 minutes fine-tuning your prompt. If I'm not appreciating your skill and the time you committed to your vision, the bar for the impact you need to make is that much higher. For me, most AI art falls flat on that front as well.
Maybe someone will be the breakthrough artist that shows the rest of us luddites what a genuinely beautiful interplay between drafting a prompt and massaging an engine will look like, but (1) even that person is something other than a painter or a photographer, and (2) I don't think we're there yet and may never be.
That is at least reasonable. I really don't expect you to be impressed by anybody's efforts in AI prompting. Calling it not-art is subjectively wrong, but not being impressed is right in most cases.
Not-art is subjectively right. AI "art" is made by taking imagery and reassembling it according to an algorithm. There's no thought, no imagination, no anything creative behind it. Can it be aesthetically pleasing? Sure, like a sunset can be. But neither are art because there's no intention behind it.
Where is this definition from? Somewhere official, or your own personal definition?
Most art, hell, most human achievements, are generally just combining things in no way that people thought of before.
Yes, but with intent.
The one thing even the most simple ui for promoting requires is some modicum of intent
Is a picture of a sunset art? If the photographer chose a particularly scenic view and took several pictures before deciding on the one they felt was best, is that not art? Does the photographer have to, personally, hike to find the vantage point and take the picture for it to be art? Can they use a drone instead? How about just feeds from a camera someone set up? If the person looks through a feed and takes some high quality screenshots of a particularly vivid sunset that moves them, and decides to frame it and display it, is it disqualified from being art because they didn't create the sunset and just selected the image from a series of images they were looking at? Is it slop if they decide to digitally remove a tree that was blocking the view?
This is the problem I have. Every argument against AI art inevitably closes the door against some other form of art that the arguer would otherwise consider acceptable. I know you're not going to like or accept this answer, but the reason it's so hard to have an argument that only applies to AI art and not any other forms of art is because AI art IS art.
It's art, because art is subjective. The moment you start trying to define it or gatekeep it, the meaning will slip through your fingers like grains of sand.
Yes, IF the photographer chose the framing, angle, lighting etc. of the picture. If it was randomly taken by a drone or if someone just thrust out a camera and started blindly taking pictures, that's not art. UNLESS the person was trying to make some sort of statement about how randomly taken pictures look. Again, it's all about intent more than the actual composition. There has to be some sort of underlying idea that's being expressed. AI cannot have ideas.
I'll answer each of the questions because I find thinking about it interesting:
Yes, explained above.
No. They can take any picture they have specifically chosen to take the way they took it.
Yes. The method used doesn't matter, the fact that they chose the picture to look the way is does is what matters.
If they stopped it at a certain point and chose that framing for a reason, not random chance, then yes.
This one is a really good question if the video feed is presumed to be an automated one not shot by a person and was not set up to capture the sunset or anything in particular. There was no intent behind the images being captured, it's just a recording of what things looked like in a specific place at a specific time. Yet a person could choose one of these random images and decide they liked the composition. Would the aesthetically pleasing image being hung on a wall be art? Well, would a seashell chosen from a beach for its appearance and put on display be art? I would say no, the picture or seashell themselves both qualify as decorations, not art. However, their chosen placement in a space is a form of art. So AI generated images (or anything at all, really) could be made into a component of art even if the individual parts are not themselves art.
Totally depends on how extensive the change is if AI is creating the image where the tree used to be.
Are you the type of person who pretends you made a cheeseburger when you got it from a drive though window? Because that's what you sound like.
Prompters don't make decisions in the piece, the algorithm generated stuff and if the prompter doesn't like it, then they prompt again. No choices made.
It's like how you all use the same words when someone disagrees with you, "luddite" and "gatekeeping". You can't really think for yourself so your regurgitate what someone else wrote.
People using prompts are not "making" art. They are hallucinating theft from actual artists. There never was any skill or materials gate. Pen or pencil and a scrap of paper, pick it up and start. There is no defense for AI "art" or the shills that push it.
If you use summary tools on google to make you a list or a paragraph you're ripping off actual writers and stealing their collective style. (Language models don't just come from nowhere after all) Spell check is ok, but if you write like you're borderline illiterate, well, pick up a grammar book and a notepad and get cracking. Hire a professional editor to plan your next set of PowerPoint slides.
Sheesh.
There is nothing new under the sun, even artists who draw their own stuff learn from other artists and use it in their art. AI training isn't theft as long as the art is free to look at, that is just sour grapes. Torrenting anything and using it either as inspiration for your own work, or for training AI is theft and shouldn't be done by anybody, but especially not corporations. Either way, it isn't the training that is theft.
Disney has assembled a very good case against one generative AI company, showing that the stuff "learned" from shared art is essentially infringing on copyright and failing to assemble its own ideas. They asked it for "A man in a metal suit" and it would consistently give them Iron Man, down to the fine details.
We've moved away from the simple Copy and Paste tools in image editors, but I would say not nearly far enough for technology to evade the principles of trademark and copyright infringements. The "model" is in many ways just a database of other people's stolen artwork, ready to be rearranged.
Even so, if you commission a picture of Iron Man or if you generate a picture of Iron Man... both are going to be covered under trademark without any need to differentiate the two.
I don't like ai-art, most of the time it is a pursuit of the economic value of an aesthetic without a genuine engagement with the human part.
Further, AI is part of a broad process of dehumanization that diminishes the value of humans and the human condition in favor of an imagined intelligence that all artists have always instinctually understood was a threat.
No artists with any wisdom at all thinks skill is a gatekeeper for human artists, skill is rather the inveitable result of a sustained intimacy between an artist and their art and what you mistake for a worship of skill is a love of that relationship framed in the context of skill. In so far as the obsession with artistic skill acts as a gatekeeper to anybody, it is in large part because capitalism demands things be abstracted and reduced to pure economic value. Artists rarely gatekeep art themselves, the gatekeeping has NOTHING to do with artists nor does it originate from their desire to create art it is a peripheral process imposed upon art by distorting forces attempting to control art (such as AI).
Also, people need to stop lazily using the example of Luddites without knowing their history. They aren't who you think they were, stop dropping the reference like you know what it means if you don't know what it means.
TL;DR If skill is a gatekeeper to art it is because capitalism demands scarcity be imposed upon the pursuit of making art, it has nothing to do with art itself. Hailing AI as a gift to would-be artists totally misses the point, I am not against using new tools to make art, I am against the rise in dehumanization dominating societies around the world at the moment of which AI is a central actor.