OpenAI's latest image-generation update has taken social media by storm, as users are flooding X, Instagram, and Reddit with Studio Ghibli-style images
Well, there’s a word for art that was made by someone using tools: art.
This has mainly not been what people use it for, and far more importantly such people aren’t even the target market. It’s exceedingly poor form to pretend otherwise.
People use Photoshop to create cat memes and manipulate pictures of Vice President J. D. Vance but that doesn’t mean that the use of Photoshop disqualifies the output from being considered art. Even the cat pictures are art.
If a person decides they want to create an image in the style of a film that they love and they make something that fits their vision then who are we to say that it isn’t art? Do we have the right to examine their entire process to determine that they used only the tools that we approve of and only the methods that we approve of? Are they disqualified for using generative fill to fix some complex shading?
What if they generate a tree, is the rest of the piece now ‘Not Art’ because they used an AI tool?
That’s why this position against generative art doesn’t make any sense. The line you choose to draw between ‘Real Art’ and ‘Not Art’ is always going to be arbitrary and no two people will have the same definition.
I think this is a great example of people confusing their personal tastes with some universal truth about the world. "I don’t like art generated with AI tools’ is perfectly valid. But to simply declare that my personal taste is THE Definition of Art is hubris.
Well, there’s a word for art that was made by someone using tools: art.
This has mainly not been what people use it for, and far more importantly such people aren’t even the target market. It’s exceedingly poor form to pretend otherwise.
People use Photoshop to create cat memes and manipulate pictures of Vice President J. D. Vance but that doesn’t mean that the use of Photoshop disqualifies the output from being considered art. Even the cat pictures are art.
If a person decides they want to create an image in the style of a film that they love and they make something that fits their vision then who are we to say that it isn’t art? Do we have the right to examine their entire process to determine that they used only the tools that we approve of and only the methods that we approve of? Are they disqualified for using generative fill to fix some complex shading?
What if they generate a tree, is the rest of the piece now ‘Not Art’ because they used an AI tool?
That’s why this position against generative art doesn’t make any sense. The line you choose to draw between ‘Real Art’ and ‘Not Art’ is always going to be arbitrary and no two people will have the same definition.
I think this is a great example of people confusing their personal tastes with some universal truth about the world. "I don’t like art generated with AI tools’ is perfectly valid. But to simply declare that my personal taste is THE Definition of Art is hubris.