Would you feel defrauded to find out that you had knowingly paid money for a “work of art” created by AI, if you have previously found it to your satisfaction?

I tend to not care too much myself. I trust my own sense of taste. If I enjoy content, I probably won’t care if AI made it, though I’ll admit a pro-human bias, because humans are capable of suffering and lack. Part of being pro-human for me is being fine with others using tools and techniques to reduce effort and especially drudgery.

I still use spellcheck. I don’t use dictation tools or read aloud tools, but I am human and I struggle like anyone else to exert myself. I just don’t require assistance to do those things right now, but I know that may change at a moment’s notice. Though I don’t “need” assistive technology or devices presently, I still enjoy and prefer subtitles even now.

If you need to use tools to consume or produce, I won’t look down on you. Just be honest about it. If you used AI to make something, just say so. It’s not a personal failing to use AI tools, but it is a failing to use them and then lie about it.

Photojournalists know what I mean, as they can do in-camera techniques as long as it isn’t misrepresenting how a scene appears to a person basically, whereas most post-processing techniques are not really considered in comporting with professional ethics because representation of reality is the aim and goal, not making aesthetic decisions or staging photos as if they are naturalistic, but documenting actual events that transpired independently of the people capturing the events on camera.

But there’s a point where what we have doesn’t have enough cooks in the kitchen, as silly as that sounds. AI generated subtitles are often wrong, and there’s no way as a human who is reading them to suggest corrections on most platforms. Now we have AI automated dubbing, which I have only used a few times. It seems mostly fine, but I don’t think failures are as obvious in that case if I don’t speak the source language, so I guess I’m mostly speaking of closed captions or subtitles in languages I speak, since other errors I wouldn’t notice to begin with, such as errors in translation.

How much art isn’t being made til now, not for lack of will, drive, desire, or grit, but inability to develop skills and taste because they don’t have arms, literally or metaphorically. Isn’t it a bit like gatekeeping art to say that art made by AI isn’t a true work of art? AI tools aren’t self-directed or self-aware. There is a human involved somewhere, and they are a patron of the arts at the very least, if not an editor. I view the human in the loop as legitimate an artist as Andy Warhol at his height of production capacity. He didn’t even make art. He made decisions about what art is once he saw it in the world. His art was recontextualization. AI is just going through the looking glass.

So it goes. Same as it ever was? Wasn’t it ever thus? Art is for us by us, but that’s not a given. I didn’t make the flower I admire, either, nor the apple of my eye.

Don’t let anything steal your joy, even you and your own preconceived notions of what joy ought be caused by, or you’re just raining on your own parade and those of others, or becoming an old person shaking their fist at a cloud. We’re making rainbows if you’d just wait.