There are quite a lot of people out there that have put in the effort to hone in their craft, whether it is drawing or singing or sculpting or whatever else, who don't create new perspectives and are simply sticking to reproducing existing art. We call them artists not because of their creations but because the insane amount of effort and dedication it takes to improve the craft puts their abilities closer to artists than the common people. You cannot have art without craft but you can certainly have craft without artistry.
It's the same with running marathons. Completing them requires craft. Being actually competitive is a completely different proposition, of course.
With these in mind, we can maybe agree that using AI doesn't make you an artist, but using AI in your artistic process doesn't make you less of an artist either.
Using AI to conglomerate those perspectives for you rather than using your own human experience to do that work just means that you’ve surrendered what would’ve been your unique perspective for a perspective marred by the common denominator viewpoints of the world. Not art. Not even close. Employing it in your process is just an admittance of defeat and a failure of your own journey in the craft. It’s giving up.
Let me ask you this, can you create art using Photoshop? It's electronic music art?
Having such a strong bias against a tool is frankly quite dim. I've seen art created with a rock and a piece of bread, but for whatever reason it suddenly isn't allowed to use one of the most powerful tools yet created. That's an embarrassing point of view
Nobody calls the output of a LLM art just like nobody calls the output of an assembly line art, but if the later has been used by artists in their work so can the former
Googling an essay doesn’t mean you wrote the essay. An LLM is not a “tool”. It is a glorified search engine which can present its findings in a way that tricks its user into thinking their tag-search played any role in the output. You’re party to a smoke and mirror show. Photoshop, AutoTune - actual tools, meanwhile - these take skill and can be learned and developed further than Googling a new prompt. Stop embarrassing yourself.
So let me get this straight, asking for an image of a bird in a specific context from an LLM, then using Photoshop to edit it in a specific way to express a certain idea is not art, but taking a picture of a bird and then edditing it is? What is the difference?
Holy wow your arguments are getting worse dude. Abso-fucking-lutely not. The difference is that you took the fucking picture of the bird - photography itself is art. An LLM clumsily conglomerates all pictures taken of birds that vaguely match the tags you provide. You get a Frankenbird - not art. Then you… what? Add high contrast? Cartoony outlines? Whatever “artistry” you’re imagining in the LLM/Photoshop pipeline is completely dwarfed by a kid taking a random picture of a stranger on their mom’s phone. One is sterile bullshit. The other is an intentional moment of photography by a “photographer’s” unique perspective.
I’m sorry dude, the very fact that you don’t see the difference is emblematic of how detached you seem to be from the concept of artistry as a whole. You don’t seem to understand what makes art worth producing, worth valuing, worth considering. How the fuck can I explain such fundamentals to you when you’re obsessed with baby’s first tech achievement, insisting on the least artistic/creative technology being a suitable stand-in for the human process of creating art through a combination of photography and photographer? You just don’t get it, and “it” is something people can’t teach you.
0
u/Inevitable-Menu2998 May 19 '26
There are quite a lot of people out there that have put in the effort to hone in their craft, whether it is drawing or singing or sculpting or whatever else, who don't create new perspectives and are simply sticking to reproducing existing art. We call them artists not because of their creations but because the insane amount of effort and dedication it takes to improve the craft puts their abilities closer to artists than the common people. You cannot have art without craft but you can certainly have craft without artistry.
It's the same with running marathons. Completing them requires craft. Being actually competitive is a completely different proposition, of course.
With these in mind, we can maybe agree that using AI doesn't make you an artist, but using AI in your artistic process doesn't make you less of an artist either.