The best definition of Art that I have heard is “an object/piece that makes one feel things”

However, AI slop makes many people feel anger, so I don’t know if that definition can really fit or not. Probably not.

There is art, such as music, that has the intent of of making people angry or frustrated too. So, it is a grey area and as you said, very messy.

That’s a good point, it would be fraud, but art is very interpretive.

It reminds me of that Banksy painting that he put a shredder in the frame and it was put on auction. When the painting sold for $1.4 million, the painting proceeded to shred.

I don’t know if that Banksy painting would be considered fraud or not, but he definitely made a statement.

I don’t recall the term CGI slop during my college days of game and graphic design, but I do recall people hating movies with CGI in them. Then as they became better, that rhetoric faded for a few years, but then it came back with AI slop.

Humans can create slop in all aspects of life too. If we didn’t, we would probably be living in a utopia. The problem now is that we create slop faster than ever, because it is like a get rich quick scam.

I treat AI as a tool, rather than a crutch. With the millions of people that are using AI for everything though, using it as a crutch is, unfortunately, far more common.

I think you’re mostly right about how AI works, but I think some of the conclusions go a bit further than what the mechanics alone really show.

Yes, AI is an algorithm and it’s statistical. It learns patterns and maps inputs to outputs. I don’t really disagree with that part. Where I start to disagree is the idea that this automatically means the output can’t be novel or meaningful. A human brain is also a physical system processing information according to rules. Saying AI is “just an algorithm” only really works as a dismissal if humans aren’t doing something similar, which I’m not convinced is true.

The Excel average comparison also feels a little off to me. Averaging collapses information. Generative models don’t really do that. They explore and recombine patterns across a large possibility space, which feels a lot closer to how people learn and create than how a spreadsheet works. It’s true you could replicate an AI with enough paper and time, but the same thing applies to any finite physical system, including a human brain. That feels more like computability than about creativity or authorship. Another point I do agree with is how AI is used matters a lot. If someone is mostly prompting and picking outputs, that’s closer to curation than creation. But that isn’t really unique to AI. We’ve had similar debates with photography, sampling, filters, and procedural art. Art has never just been about manual effort anyway, it’s more about intent and judgment.

So I think what we aren’t lining up on is less about what AI is, and (as some others have noted here) is more about where we draw the line for authorship and responsibility in how it’s actually used. I do appreciate your perspective on it, and it’s definitely a very grey philosophical to discuss.

I do openly disclose my use of AI and I have no intention on selling them.

While anyone can bash on some keys, it is becoming more difficult to even prove something wasn’t created by AI.

So, that spurs another question; If someone made it a goal to generate something fake and fool everyone that they create, while the artwork was generated and is not their own, the intention was to fool everyone to make a statement… would the deception be a form of art?

That gif is one of my favorites to use lol