#this topic is a thorn on my side as a professional artist but i can't deny the very interesting discussions it sparks

[strike-another-match]

personally i feel the "you didn't actually make that" accusation against AI artists is normally, if not always, justified. i think it is possible to use any medium to make art, and that includes transformative art (like blackout poetry or collage) but - and this is a big but ‼️ - you have to contribute something of your own to it if you want others to look at it and agree that the artwork is at least partially yours

so in the end if you want authorship, you need control, and if you want control, you need skill. when someone with no knowledge of the visual arts types some words into a prompt box and gets a nice image, that image is nice precisely because the machine (in reality, the authors of the artwork the machine was trained with) took all the artistic decisions for them. that is why we say "you didn't actually make that"!

open the door for more user control and, akin to letting a passenger fly a plane, you will end up with a wreck - unless that person is willing to learn what they need to learn to be entrusted with those decisions. so what i'm trying to say is: you can use AI to make art, but it will take a similar set of skills and a similar amount of time to make than it would take to make any other kind of art

(of course, not everyone cares about this, and that's fine. this post is exclusively about the people that seek to claim artistic authorship of images generated through AI tools)