General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Mastodon.art just banned AI art [View all]Ms. Toad
(33,915 posts)Both are tools. You can accomplish great things with tools - as well as pretty crappy things.
The challenge with AI is not that is a crutch, or being lazy. A lot of innovation has been called lazy or a crutch until we got used to it. As to photography there was (and still is, in some artistic circles) a lot of criticism of both digital cameras and the digital darkroom. For that matter, there was criticism that photography, itself, wasn't real art.
One challenge is that AI builds on the work of others and most of it does nto properly license those works. In other words. Most AI tools currently steal from the original artists. If there are ways to limit AI to using properly licensed original content, it may well be a useful tool for legitimate artists.
A second challenge is that the work product is largely indistinguishable from original works, so it not only creates a substantial risk of theft from the original artists - it creates an additional risk that its product will be submitted by someone who asserts they created it. That creates a problem for traditional evaluation tools in academic endeavors.
But as long as the original artists are compensated for their work (and have the right to opt out of having their work used), whoever is creating the AI art will still have to sort the wheat from the chaff (as photographers who use camera phones do now), and it will either succeed or fail on its merits.