LogFAQs > #979498011

DrYuya posted...

Not arguing that the person who "creates" it is an artist.

If they are creating art, they are, by literal definition, an artist.

You could argue to which degree they influence the act of creation, but that's one mother of a slippery slope because every artist uses tools. There is a significant difference between someone who fingerpaints on a cave wall using self-crafted pigments and someone who draws on a computer tablet or manipulates a photograph in Photoshop, but they're all still artists.

Someone creating AI art still needs to have the skills necessary to tell it to create the image they're looking for, and to at least some degree they're still impressing their intentions and mental expectations onto the work. One could argue that there's a difference between someone who is micromanaging descriptions and commands versus someone who just types out a single short sentence, but there's also a difference between someone who spends months painting a masterpiece and someone who doodles on a napkin for 30 seconds.

People get hung up on the idea of the tool, but ultimately we're liking going to reach a point as the tech improves where the end product becomes almost indistinguishable from anything a human could create. Which can actually open doors for people to become more creative (like, say, someone who has ideas for a comic but lacks the skill to draw it, who can now potentially use the new tools to provide art - in exactly the same way most sprite-art comics allowed people who couldn't draw to still tell stories).

There are already AI that can write and perform songs you'd never realize wasn't composed by a human. The limiting factor isn't "technology bad, no human soul", the limiting factor is the tech is still in its infancy, and WILL improve. The future is coming whether people want it to or not.


For fun, go back and look at CGI animation in the early 90s and tell me if you think it had "soul" or would ever be anything other than a computer-generated abomination. Then think about the fact that nearly every cartoon today is animated via computer and hand-drawn cel-based animation is almost a dead art. Shit evolves.