How to you estimate the 'time and skill' that went into the creation of a random piece of art? Is a portrait that took 50 hours to paint inherently more worthy than a virtually identical one that took 5 hours? Is the slower artist the better artist? Is a Bob Ross 'happy little trees, body of water, mountain in background'-image not artistically valuable because he does it in 20 minutes?

As for skill: I would argue that a random Banksy takes a lot less skill than the average Artemisia Gentileschi (admit it: you had to look her up). Yet, one is celebrated art, the other is virtually unknown and at best 'one among many baroque northern-Italian painters'.

Those are earnest questions, I want to understand the recently-recurring time-and-skill argument. What sort of people honestly look at a picture and ask 'yes, but how long did it take to make? How long had the artist to be trained for this?'

And on top of those things, I'd add that good artists use that time to deepen the work and their understanding of the work.

If you're doing, say, factory work, you can just zone out. You do the same thing over and over, and you do it well enough, but your mind is somewhere else.

But somebody who's truly during art is present in the work as they're doing it. They're up to something. I think that's a big part of why the work of serious artists changes over time. It's an exploration.

In contrast, look at some kitch producer like Thomas Kinkade, Painter of Light™. He was clearly successful financially. But I'd argue that there is little more to it than "AI" "art".

For me appreciating art always involves reaching for an understanding of the artist and the humanity we share. An Ansel Adams print is lovely, but ultimately I end up thinking not just about the image or the landscape. I think about being in the landscape. About the process of getting that one perfect photo. About what drives a person to seek that and to go to such incredible lengths. About how Adams saw the world.

If I'm going to think hard about some GenAI output, I'm going to appreciate the technology that went into it. But there's no more to think about the prompter than there is about somebody picking out clip art.

I can listen to music and recognize the artist or a singer’s voice. It doesn’t mean as much without that relationship. Depending on the style of music some of the charm is in production imperfections or sloppy playing that brings a distinctly human quality to it.

>Not to say that coding doesn't have those two, but I'd argue developers have been caring less and less for it over the years.

I think this is both hindsight bias and survivorship bias.

There has always been massive buckets of buggy shit code out there. Now, one thing we had in the past was very tight computing limitations that worked as a decent evolutionary death function. As computing resources grew, the selection function became less effective and we get to see these hulking crap monsters lumber around our CPUs.

> We are seeing pushback on games developed using AI.

Yes, people whine but still buy the games, as long as they're fun. Expressed preference of "AI is always bad" vs revealed preference of "It's fine if the product is still good."

I was speaking to an upholsterer yesterday and he was saying that using foam as stuffing is cheating.

That's a bit different than art. I put it closer to "why do you care if your girlfriend is AI or real? Isn't it just the end emotions you care about?". There is a deep human connection to art, creativity, expression of human emotions and feelings. Reading a poem about losing a loved one and connecting with it, only to find out it was written by a machine is a deep betrayal of that. Its like finding out the love letter you got in school was actually a mockery by the person you had a crush on -- what does it matter? the letter made you feel good right, and that's all you were after. It matters because intention and emotion of other humans matters to most people.

Not everything is purely about being able to output a product and/or produce a tangible good or service. Some things are about people and how people feel.

Another example. I run a charity that takes money, but just generates AI videos simulating helping children. What does it matter? Ultimately the person donating just wants to feel like they made a difference, and they get the same feeling either way, believing the money is well spent. It matters because no one is really being helped, no virtue is actually being enacted in the world.

In the same way, generating all our art and music from AI would represent a massive harm in the world -- effectively extinguishing massive portions of human creativity, and all the people who get to feel useful in creating, editing, and distributing it. In a cold capitalist view, what does it matter, I just want to see a pretty picture for a moment. In terms of actual real value in the world, it is negative and selfish, assuming the only value is my temporary enjoyment of product.

>As such, their work and livelihoods OUGHT to be more important and more deserving of protectionism.

FTFY.

Photography, computer graphics, Photoshop, synthesizers, samplers, and others have all been considered "not real art."

The irony is that the kind of genre art you see at Comic-Con is mostly reproductions of commercial properties or standard tropes and formulas, with very little original vision and creativity. Being able to draw something recognisable as [genre character name goes here], even with some skill, is not that high a bar, and it lives in a tiny niche in the art world as a whole.

AI brought something fresh to art for a while, but now I think creative people are more aware of the limitations. It's in a strange mid-way place between being fascinating, and being frustratingly limited compared to what it could be.

I suspect we'll start seeing meta-art soon with a much more interesting mix of creation, original thought, and execution.

“Good” is some mix of taste and skill.

People without taste hide behind skill. They do everything technically correctly and still make something bad. This is the threat of new mediums to them — it takes away their only strength.

But at the same time, something like AI suddenly enables people with neither taste nor skill to produce. I don’t want to see AI art right now — AI art is currently a lot of noise.

The sentiment of photography not being real art hasn’t been a thing for a while now though.

Maybe a linter is a more accurate allegory. I think there are parts of art that could sometimes be suggested in terms of anatomy, symmetry, shading, color theory, etc. You'd configure your art linter to your preferences/style (or target style) and it would point out the things you're doing wrong and offer suggested fixes.

You could argue red and blue squiggles have been nudging us that way for a few decades.

> But it's not really a question of style if you misspell certain words.

Sure it is. Flagging vernacular, phonetic spelling for accents, punning, signalling a character's use of a word they are unfamiliar with, and so on and so forth. Intentionally misspelling words can definitely be a stylistic choice.

Try https://vizcom.ai, it might be closer to what you are looking for.

Honestly I'm okay with "AI art" becoming a category. The issue is when it's presented as handmade, causing confusion.

Digital artwork being presenting at an oil painting conference would cause similar confusion and outrage for the same reasons.

I don't think it did take that long actually? And I don't think it's even a good comparison. AI art vs human art isn't the same jump as physical media to digital.