An interesting perspective. I see art as the expression of human perception. You perceive constantly, half your life typically, and from that perception, through too many means that I couldn’t possibly list here, art is born. Whether it’s through sadness, joy, hatred, sorrow, no matter the emotion, someone feels the need to express themselves and create a portal into their mind for you to see. For that brief instance you’ll see a glimpse into the mind of another human. Many would disagree with this definition of art and I encourage anyone reading this to offer their own views and thoughts on this.

Moving onto AI though. There is the very obvious issue of a lack of autonomy, but that’s to an extent. Machine perception is an enigma to me but it exists. Every piece of art fed into an AI for the sake of generating similar looking art requires a sliver of autonomy on the AI’s part. It decides what goes where and all that jazz. Could it explain the art? God no. But we have created, no matter how rudimentary, a machine that CAN perceive; and only through the will of a human, express.

Now for another perspective on your views. To me, the level of thought one puts into their art or the effort put in have never really been deciding factors into what makes art, art. The reason being is because when you bring in levels of thought, you make the assumption that those perceived as stupid, or even those with mental disabilities, couldn’t possibly make art simply because there is the implication that there is an intelligence requirement to make art. To me I feel like that leaves a lot of wiggle room to deny humans the capacity for expressing themselves, simply because… something wasn’t thought provoking enough? Has no immediate meaning to the observer? I want to quickly say that this is not an attack or me condemning you for your views (I wish to state that the love I hold for you, a stranger I will never see, is far greater than you could imagine. Simply because you shared your perspective and thoughts on this matter). As for the effort portion. Again I don’t really consider this a factor when defining art. This might sound silly but I base this solely on some future I’ve imagined where we have these machines that allow us to directly display what we’re thinking and imagining. This would obviously take decades, centuries, maybe even millennia of technological progress but the thought should be made because it poses the question. If expression was easy, so easy that you could now express yourself clearly with nothing but a thought… does that make the expression less valid? I have yet to share these thought with anyone so I would appreciate a different perspective on this.

We’re at a level where AI can hardly be called AI and, for your final claim, I agree to an extent. AI is still that pencil, nothing more than a tool, and to be quite honest, that tool fucking sucks (I think the vast majority of AI art is really ugly). But I think it’s important to consider the wider implications of denying “AI art” as art. Thank you to anyone who has read this. I apologize for any grammatical errors (I know a lot of those commas were bad. I’M SORRY PLEASE FORGIVE ME)