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I'm not sure how you justify the "probably" in the last sentence. If we posit that, say, Van Gogh left a piece of his soul into his famous self portrait through the act of painting it, how can we deny that Duchamp left a piece of soul into the urinal when he placed it in an art gallery? What's the mechanism here by which we can make the judgment call of "probably" or "probably not?"
I think that's a perfectly reasonable way to determine whether a work of art is interesting. What I find confusing here, though, is that, by that standard, AI art is interesting! To take the beach metaphor, someone who types in "big booba anime girl" into Midjourney on Discord and posts his favorite result on Twitter is akin to someone who hovers over this beach and snaps photos using a simple point and shoot, then publishes the resulting prints that he likes (if we stretch a bit, this is all nature photography or even street photography). In both cases, a conscious person is using his subjective judgment to determine the features of what gets shared. Fundamentally, this would be called "curation" rather than "illustration," and one can certainly argue that curation isn't interesting or that it's not an art, but by the standard that it requires a conscious being using his subjective judgment to communicate something through his choices in the results, curation fits just as well as any other work of art.
This is why I believe there's something more to it than that and alluded to the mysticism in my previous comment.
I feel that the snapping pictures of a beach and choosing the best ones gets at something here. That doesn't really sound like art at all. It's an obvious thing to point a camera at and has little intention to it, only a few more degrees of freedom than your anime example. The more you specify the care and thought that goes into the choice of view and reasoning behind it and craft to control the image, the closer it gets to art. Same with prompting. If you do enough micro decisions, curation and combination and juxtaposition of what the ai gives you, the more you are moving in the direction of art.
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It was a joke.
I agree that this is a valid point. It's not enough to outweigh the negatives for me, but I agree that that is at least something you can say in defense of AI.
I see, it must have gone over my head, but that's not an unusual experience for me with jokes, unfortunately. So is it that you were just being ironic, and that your meaning was the opposite, that the mysticism around art being imbued with a part of the artist's soul is still quite common in artists' circles, with a part of Duchamp's soul being in that toilet just as much as, e.g. part of Van Gogh's soul being in his self portrait?
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