A month or so back I was engaging with an individual on the MyAnimeList forums about whether AI art should be considered art or not. In my mind, I had already established that I do not regard AI art as true art as it is machine generated, and even if you wanted to make the argument that it's not entirely machine-gen then I would ask you where it came from, and then you'd say pre-existing artworks, and I would say exactly. However the person I was speaking with brought up the, in my opinion, valid point of it taking a bit of effort to fine-tune an AI creation to be just right. This would include things such as being precise in your descriptions so that the machine generates just what you had in mind, and also making sure it doesn't have any odd deformities such as extra fingers. Things were civil and I told them that they had changed my perspective a tiny bit, however I was still not convinced that AI art is true art in the way a painting or sculpture is. I began to tell them that what makes human art so special is that it is created by a person with intent. The example I used was that if you drew a picture of somebody yourself, then that is truly them as you have made it in their image, but a computer could only make an approximation of the person you are describing, and thus less personal. Their response was to draw a shitty picture with the label "my dad, looks just like him", to which I told them that if they wanted to make art by describing things to write a damn book. At the same time, another person chimed in by telling the group that by my logic a picture of a turd would be more valuable than an AI generated turd, to which I doubled down and just said that was right because what the fuck even is that argument. Duh, a real picture is going to be more real than anything AI can generate. The former person did however lead into my next point, a point which I was putting off making as to not hurt their feelings; art takes talent and skill. They proved there and then that yapping to chatgpt does not make someone good at art. The pure fact that it takes time and effort to not only produce a piece of art but to also learn those skills. They had perfectly highlighter the fact that while a few scribbles drawn by a child may not be considered fine art, they serve as a point of reference for greater pieces of greater effort, effort which is simply unmatched by descriptive prompts. I'm also gonna take this opportunity to say that I pray that the AI bubble bursts in a similar way to the DOTCOM bubble and every bigtech company which has invested in it goes to absolute shit, because I think that would be hilarious to watch :)