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All this seems perfectly cromulent, but this doesn't seem to address the difference in AI generated imagery versus, say, a painting. Whether the algorithm is a diffusion model, an LLM, or the physics of molecules of paint, brushes, canvas, etc., the algorithm itself can't make creative decisions. But humans can and do make creative decisions in terms of how to direct those above algorithms to generate images.
I've seen this exact line of thinking brought up many times in discussion about AI art, and I'm confused why people seem to think that that means (modern) AI-generated images (and songs and poems, etc.) aren't the results of human creative decisions. Even putting in a blank or a randomly generated prompt into the first diffusion model one encounters is a creative decision. Even if we take away the AI and posit that the images were just sitting on the floor, poofed into existence by God or aliens or random chance of nature, the decision to share it with others is a creative decision. Until we get to truly agentic AI, any media that's shared is necessarily the result of a human making a creative decision somewhere.
If I were arguing against myself, actually, I might have used the example of found art, or perhaps animal art, which I think people are often more generous toward?
In this case I think the sense that no skill or taste has been exercised is important. Drawing a picture seems to require some level of effort or skill, which a person has acquired over years of practice. There may be an incoherent feeling that 'resistance' is important to art.
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Humans can take credit for AI art to the extent I can claim to be an artist when I pay a human artist to "make me a picture of grapes and some flowers and a skull". If I specify the picture extremely specifically then I start to be able to claim a fraction of the authorship, but it takes a lot for us not to intuit that the dude holding the paintbrush deserves most of the credit. Most ai artists are more like commissioners.
(Relatedly the question of credit is separate from the question of whether something is art. It might be a defensible position to say that AI art is indeed art, it's just not art by the prompter. It's art by humanity. The prompter made an infinitesimal contribution to the process.)
I don't particularly care about "credit," or what "art" means, but the part of this analogy that I find wrong is that a generative AI tool lacks agency like a human, and I don't see a way to bridge the gap until we've got scifi-level AI. A diffusion model or an LLM is "making decisions" in the same way that a bristle of a paintbrush "makes decisions" on where to place the paint on the canvas, i.e. by following the laws of physics, compelled by the human that's actually controlling the tool (whether through typing in a prompt or waving the paintbrush).
Just to try and prise apart these two types of case, what would you say about putting a penny into an art robot like Maillardet's automaton? It's hard to say that the person who activates the automaton has really created art by themselves. Maillardet did most of the decisionmaking, even if he died two centuries ago. I find myself wanting to say a similar sort of thing about AI, only a lot of people's decisions were involved in training it rather than just one.
I'm not sure what "created art by themselves" would mean specifically, but someone putting in a penny into that robot would certainly have made a creative decision by deciding to use that particular machine or to use any machine at all to create a drawing. He could have inserted the penny into a different machine, or taken that penny and scratched markings onto a piece of paper to create some "art," or, at possibly the most trivial case, he could have also just decided to frame that penny and present it as "art" in itself, and all of those would have involved some level of creative decisionmaking. In each case, the way the final result reflects his decisionmaking would be somewhat different. I.e. if he actually etched onto a piece of paper using the penny, he would have made decisions on where and how hard each marking was, whereas if he just framed the penny, he would have decided which penny to present, but he didn't make any decision on the angles of the curves that form Lincoln's portrait on the penny.
Certainly, I'd agree that many people's decisions went into any diffusion model-based AI-generated image, not just that of the person who typed in the prompt. Much like many people's decisions went into a photograph, such as that of the lens manufacturer and the city engineer who deemed that some building's awnings had to be a certain way and the businessman who spit his gum out on the sidewalk one day which turned into a black mark and the kid who decided to throw rocks at a flock of birds seconds before the photographer pressed the shutter.
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