If you really understand what your tools do (not how tools do it), you are a true professional (in this case, an artist). You use some tools to achieve a certain effect and you know what it will be like. AI “artists” don’t know what AI will do for them in the next moment. At least something like that.
Relevant (Youtube)
Being good at prompting AI to generate art is like being good at using a search engine to find a specific picture.
Search engineAI artists!
This is a true triumph of the human spirit.
And the best they could come up with was anthro shit?
“Art”
You could absolutely use AI to make art. Almost all AI content you find online isn’t that though
If you take away an artist’s brushes, they can’t make art without making new brushes.
All this example shows is that brushes are easier to make yourself than a LLM is.
I don’t like AI art, but I don’t think this particular argument proves anything meaningful.
There are a ton of other types of art than those using brushes. Hell, the example is using something other than a brush.
As a digital artist his brush is a stylus pen, but he can put that down and use a whittled burnt charcoal pencil, because they’re both largely brush-like objects. A prompt-wrangler can’t go into their backyard and whip up a midjourney-like object to use in the same way.
But I don’t think complexity of tools makes a real artist.
If the argument is that digital artists have learnt the skill of drawing and therefore count as real artists, well some percentage of prompt-wranglers can draw, and some percentage of conceptual, ‘outsider’ and other artists can’t draw.
Almost all professionally trained artists can draw, but I hope we can agree that professionally trained doesn’t = real artist either.
I think “plagiarists aren’t real artists” is a much sounder argument than this, but mostly I don’t think there’s much sense in policing who or what is a real artist. Even about stuff I don’t like.
In the OP their entire medium and tool set was taken away and they still made art. Not sure how that’s not demonstrating perfectly that an artist can make art no matter what they have on hand.
piss in the snow
