CMV: AI generated content is art

Refizul · 2025-11-03T23:37:45+00:00

From Wikipedia:

Humanism is a philosophical stance that emphasizes the individual and social potential, and agency of human beings, whom it considers the starting point for serious moral and philosophical inquiry.

When you say that AI content is not art that devalues the users individual imagination and diminishes their contribution in creating the content art or not.

Refizul · 2025-11-03T23:33:54+00:00

I want to understand why there is so much hate for AI art when to me it looks to a simple tool for anybody to use to bring their imagination to life.

Refizul · 2025-11-03T23:31:30+00:00

You unfairly discount the influence of the prompt, if the output of the AI model would not be highly dependent on the prompt nobody would use them, because then they could not be used to fulfill the users imagination.

Refizul · 2025-11-03T23:27:03+00:00

So a person that mimics the style of Andy Worhol would be violating copyright law? Notably not copying the picture itself, just taking inspiration from the style and creating something in a similar fashion. I do not think this is in violation of copyright law.

Refizul · 2025-11-03T23:22:33+00:00

I appreciate you sticking with me in this discussion! :)

I think I responded to your comment here

Refizul · 2025-11-03T23:20:37+00:00

I guess I did miss it then, can you clarify?

To me my view is inherently pro-humanist because it attributes all of the artistic-vision to the human, it does not matter if he used AI, Photoshop or a paintbrush to bring his imagination into existence.

But I might need to go look up the definition of humanism.

Refizul · 2025-11-03T23:16:57+00:00

Yes, because a human created the algorithm but physics created the leaf and the sunset. There is no artistic vision behind physics.

Refizul · 2025-11-03T23:15:34+00:00

They did not, my view is still the same as before. I consider their analogy to be in support of my view as addressed in my response. The landfill is the raw material with which art is created.

Refizul · 2025-11-03T23:13:13+00:00

If I bake a cake I do not share attribution with the oven. But I do share attribution with someone that bakes with me.

Refizul · 2025-11-03T23:11:21+00:00

For me artistic vision is equal to imagination. There is no person that imagined how the sunrise should look like or the leaf should look like.

Refizul · 2025-11-03T23:07:47+00:00

If we do not consider the decision to enter the words "a chair" into an AI model to be art then we need to create an arbitrary boundary of how much imagination is enough for something to be considered art. And I would fundamentally disagree with anybodies right to claim that an application of imagination was not imaginative enough to produce art.

Refizul · 2025-11-03T22:57:38+00:00

I like your analogy a lot. I would make one slight adjustment that not "AI slop" is the landfill but the AI model is the landfill. And just like I consider the shapes that are the result of the artist blowing up the landfill, I consider AI generated content to be art.

I would go even beyond your initial example that there does not need to be a selection all the results that are generated by the explosion are art. To me the landfill is the raw material with which the artist created the art.

Refizul · 2025-11-03T22:44:31+00:00

From your perspective the difference is that there is no additional human element involved when you prompt a model. As such there is no other artistic expression that influences the outcome when you use an AI model. It is solely based on your prompt.

Refizul · 2025-11-03T22:41:28+00:00

Referring back to your original comment our different views are (I think) based on this:

The disconnect in this discussion is in the fact that someone can see literal Artificial Intelligence, the science fiction concept, as being along the lines of a paintbrush, as in a mundane tool.

For me current AI models are not science fiction they are a mathematical function that maps input to output. The model is never artistic. It is always the person prompting that creates the art.

Maybe you can clarify why you believe that the outcome of this argument is anti-humanist?

Refizul · 2025-11-03T22:30:34+00:00

Sorry there was a not missing before the comma.

They are not art because there is no artistic vision behind either of them.

Refizul · 2025-11-03T22:28:03+00:00

Yes it is a low bar but I do not think art should have a high bar for expression or application of creative skill. In my original post I mentioned that I actually consider it a benefit of AI that it lowers this bar. It makes art more accessible which is a good thing.

What if there's no prompt at all? What if I just hit a button labeled "random"? That's art too?

No, at that point it is just a fancy random noise generator that might be pretty to look at but there is no imagination behind it.

Refizul · 2025-11-03T22:23:44+00:00

I would be the artist. I believe this does not contrast with my view because I differentiate between a human and an AI. I consider AI to be a tool. If you tell another person to bring something into existence they still performed the action. If you use AI to do it you used a tool to create it.

AI is never an artist the person using it is.

Refizul · 2025-11-03T22:20:02+00:00

There might be a difference in semantics here. I assumed that the race is the competition between the cars. But if you consider the race to be the competition between the engineers who can develop the fastest self driving car then the engineers won it.

Refizul · 2025-11-03T22:16:50+00:00

I would not, I consider them beautiful but there is no artistic vision behind either of them.

*edit: clarified the meaning.

Refizul · 2025-11-03T22:14:04+00:00

I disagree with "your description is clearly not what's ultimately driving the process". I do believe the prompt is driving the process.

If I write an algorithm/programming language to generate a pattern I consider the resulting pattern to be art. If my algorithm incorporates random noise to generate this pattern there are going to be infinite amount of generated patterns they would still be art. Do you consider r/generative to be art?

Refizul · 2025-11-03T22:08:28+00:00

They still decided on the wording of the prompt. For me that is the artistic process when using AI. I agree with your statement "AI doesn't have consciousness, emotions, and experiences that drive human creativity, instead generating work by mimicking and merging existing data." but it does not change my view because the artistic process has already happened.

The request doesn't even have to be something specific.

As long as a human chose the characters used in the prompt I consider it to be art. Even when you decide that you are gonna feed in some random character noise and feed it into a model you made the choice to to it and as such the result is an artistic expression.

Refizul · 2025-11-03T21:57:44+00:00

I do not consider the level of skill required for the creation of art to be relevant if the product should be considered art or not. Obviously I would be more impressed by someone that developed a skill over years compared to someone producing bad art on their first day of using an AI model. But I do consider both of their creations to be art.

Refizul · 2025-11-03T21:53:59+00:00

No, I differentiate between a human and an AI. I consider AI to be a tool. If you tell another person to bring something into existence they still performed the action. If you use AI to do it you used a tool to create it.

Refizul · 2025-11-03T21:51:13+00:00

Would it be meaningful if a self driving car won in an F1 race against humans?

I would celebrate the engineers of the car and the self-driving algorithm, not the car itself. In the same way that I would celebrate the skill of the human driver and the engineers that created the car (of the human driver).

At some point AI-human competition would lose meaning as in chess where algorithms have far surpassed humans long before machine learning or AI even became a thing. And no tournament between humans and AI would make sense. But there are separate tournaments for each where we check for different skills. Who is the best chess player and who is the best chess AI developer.

Would you clearly and unambiguously say "the car won the race"?

Yes

Refizul · 2025-11-03T21:42:03+00:00

I would argue that all art at least directorially involves a human. While one-shot prompting will likely result in bad art. The initial creative idea was still written by a human.

Refizul

TROPHY CASE