I think the statement “then photography took over” is doing a lot of work here. It’s incredibly inaccurate to say that photography took over as the primary means of visual creativity.

I think my context there was pretty obvious so it's somewhat disingenuous to take it out of context. Photography has largely taken over portrait paintings. I think photography has also largely taken over scenic paintings. I never said it completely replaced painting, it became a tool in the hands of artists the same way AI art can become a tool.

I think that most artists would still prefer to paint something that they can consider “their art”, over typing a sentence and getting back a result. Sure, it’s neat, but it will never be anything more than a novelty, or a shortcut to generic results. The process of creation is only really 50% the final result, and the process itself is an important aspect and not just a means to an end.

And I think artist will use AI to come up ideas for their art and use the output as a canvas.

Using AI just feels like a weird commodification of art - like using only pre-made Unity assets for a game and nothing else, and then having someone else make it for pennies.

Because that's the current use of AI. It doesn't mean AI will stay this way.

I’ve seen so many bizarre “AI artists” cropping up, especially online, who legitimately try to sell AI art online for hundreds of dollars.

I'm not talking about those people and I've already mentioned elsewhere that their "work" can be considered questionable.

I think the reasons people buy art can usually be put into three buckets: they appreciate the process that went behind it, they like the style of the artists or that painting in particular, or they find some meaning in it. If you wanted to buy AI art why not just prompt it yourself. What process, or artistic style, or meaning is even in AI art?

Let's say the artist trains an AI model solely on their own previous art and then releases some of those AI generated images. The person who likes the style or a particular painting, do they care it was made by AI? Doubt it, because it's in the artists style. The person who appreciates the process that went behind it, is "I put my previous works into an AI model and the model generated this image based on what I imagined this image should be" really that much less impressive than "I imagined what this image should be and so I sat behind my drawing board and drew it"? As for meaning, the artist still chooses what to release. If they release something it must have a meaning. I think it would be extremely disrespectful towards an artist to claim the art they chose to release has no meaning.

It’s not even like AI can be trained on an artist’s own works. It takes millions of samples to train AI, which a singular artist would never be able to produce. So, at some point, that model will have had to have stolen the content of its results from something.

I thought we were talking about it from a philosophical point of view. I'm not about to predict the future and claim it could or couldn't be done, but let's say it could be done. Would that change your opinion?