If you drop a paint bucket you made high class modern art worth tens of millions. If you bullshit hard enough. But in all seriousness.

There is to a point a matter of art being entirely “valid” only to the eye of a beholder. Ai “art” is by all reasonable arguments art and made by who ever is piloting the bot. That is how it is. With out the willful intent of a human the bot is innert and can not create anything. So even the most slop or slop is still a willful human creation. A tool can not act on its own.

The problem is people saying it’s not real art or that the person piloting the bot isn’t an artist are doing so based on a personal belief. Not a hard fact. Which because of the nature of art is entirely valid. People have argued what isn’t and is real art for decades. People argued digital art was fake for a decade. People argued photography was fake art for decades. And the further back you go you can find endless examples.

Some of the “best” art work in history range from extremely hard and demand decades of skill and dedication. While others took a few mins and no real skill at all.

Intent, reason and personal subjectivity are the defining facets of what is or is not art. If someone lazily has an ai generate something and takes the first pass then that’s on them for making low effort art. No different then if I draw a stick man and call it a day.

Someone who uses a bit to draft, create and literate over and over and pushes a bot to its absolute limit. Is vastly different.

Sometimes the art is in the process and not the result as well. So even if the bot shits out something mediocre, the ability to get something that actually passes for acceptable instead of slop is in and of it self an art.

AI art to me personally is a problem of quantity letting everything because of ease of access to Creation. Never before. Has humanity had the ability to create faster or more efficiently. And people are taking advantage of that to simply not try to not push the tool and to not see what can be done with the tool.

And to be very clear this is entirely aside to the legal issues around how early models were trained as well as the copyright problems, which is an entirely separate issue to all of this. It’s related but it is very much its own problem and a solvable one. We just got to convince the multi-trillion dollar companies to stop being assholes…