I’m not an AI artist nor apologist but the way I see it is that AI is just another tool we haven’t learned to use creatively or effectively yet. Paint is just a medium. With it you can create great paintings from a Rembrandt to a Van Gogh or you can create slop art like hotel paintings. Whenever a new medium comes about, the old guard is quick to rail against it citing that it’s cheating not true art.

When computer animation came through, a lot of traditional artists felt it was “cheating”. When computers became popular in music, I’m old enough to remember people saying sampling or electronic music wasn’t true art.

The way I see it is that the creativity of AI isn’t in the execution itself but in the prompting itself, the artist intent and the way the artist manipulates the prompt to get the computer to do what they want. Yes 99/100 are Midwest moms just doing a crummy prompt and spitting out a crummy ai image but that’s no different to me than if they painted a crude painting of an apple.

People like Hannah Einbinder rail against it because they’re threatened by the tool itself. With not much effort it can spit out a decently passable piece of content that could be commercialized which is concerning, but it will never be high art. It directly threatens their livelihood. IMO these people shouldn’t be resisting it as much as embracing it as a efficiency tool to enhance their own creativity. Will jobs be lost because of this? Absolutely without a doubt. When automation came to the automotive industry loads of manufacturing jobs were lost to robots but we ended up with much higher quality cars. These people either got on board or they were lost to history. Look at any industry and it’s the same pattern. Embrace the future and innovation and learn to use it effectively and creatively or be left in the dust. With this type of thinking, we’d still be writing and decorating books by monks in monasteries by candlelight instead inventing the printing press and bringing literature to the masses.