Comic Strips

Is a picture of a sunset art?

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:

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?

Yes, explained above.

Does the photographer have to, personally, hike to find the vantage point and take the picture for it to be art?

No. They can take any picture they have specifically chosen to take the way they took it.

Can they use a drone instead?

Yes. The method used doesn't matter, the fact that they chose the picture to look the way is does is what matters.

How about just feeds from a camera someone set up?

If they stopped it at a certain point and chose that framing for a reason, not random chance, then yes.

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?

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.

Is it slop if they decide to digitally remove a tree that was blocking the view?

Totally depends on how extensive the change is if AI is creating the image where the tree used to be.