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Notes -
To just repeat myself:
Why yes, if you lie to people, you can trick them into thinking that AI art was made by humans, or that human art is made by AI. It's a complicated world and that's possible. But you shouldn't be surprised when people respond to that with extreme hostility.
People are frequently bad at understanding the reasons for their convictions. In this case, the conviction that it's important for art to be made by humans, or that the social context of art matters to how it's received, is being muddled up with the idea of abstract quality.
However, underneath that, I think people do value knowing that such-and-such picture is the result of a real human being exercising skill. Effort and creativity are things that we can and do value. It's acceptable to care about these things in themselves, for their own sake.
On a last note, in my experience there hasn't been any particular valence to opposition to AI art? I don't think it's that 'the Left' with a capital L hates AI art. I think everyone hates AI art. There are very, very few people who like this technology. Consider, briefly, that the people who like this technology are themselves the unrepresentative freaks.
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.
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.
I think people generally do think photography is different to painting (less artful even). Obviously there's a lot of creative decision-making involved in a given photo, but not as much as for a given painting. Across a photographer's oeuvre, you start to see more and more evidence of intentionality, and it takes collections and curation to establish your bona fides as a photographer to a greater extent than as a painter. What I'm saying is that density of micro decisions is a relevant criteria for assigning credit. I'm not suggesting that an ai prompter deserves no credit. They do deserve some, they could earn a lot depending on the details of their project. It seems clear to me though that they are also typically drawing substantially on how other artists would decide (not just the result of their decisions) as embodied in the AI. The decision-making patterns and tendencies of previous artists are captured in the model in a way that's different from making a paintbrush or lens, which relies on a craftsperson's decisions but doesn't typically preserve their decision-making as a living force.
I'm not sure what "less artful" means, but certainly no one would claim that ai generated images aren't different from paintings, even when they explicitly use painting styles. Much like how photorealistic photographs are different from photorealistic paintings which are different from photorealistic collages which are different from photorealistic CGI renderings, in non-trivial ways. Same would go for any AI generated images.
Whether it's "as much," I'm not sure how it's possible to quantify the amount of creative decisionmaking in a way that can be meaningfully compared like that.
This phenomenon is quite evident to exist in people who use AI generated images from following anyone who has posted AI generated images for a long time as well. It applies just as well when you take the AI generated part out of it; even Twitter accounts that merely share pre-existing images of any provenance inevitably establish a pattern of intentionality in terms of the images they deem worthy to share, ie curate. I don't know if a curator is an "artist" who deserves "credit" for their "art," but certainly a curator is someone who makes creative decisions.
Again, this seems perfectly cromulent to me, but also, I really don't think "deserving credit" is a particularly meaningful thing. People subjectively credit various things for their works, like God or their family, or only their hard work and effort, or their 5th grade teacher, or the barista whose off-hand comment triggered something in their brains, etc. and I don't really have an opinion on that, other than that it doesn't seem worth having an opinion on. My point is just that "creative decisionmaking" isn't a line that cuts between AI generated images and paintings/sketches/etc. and this applies for any other analogous media.
Perhaps we don't disagree too much other than on the importance of assigning credit, which I think is quite a big part of what's going on in the practice of art. It's a game, generally speaking, of individuals putting created items up for our appreciation and if we sense there are not enough micro decisions involved, it's either a deliberate subversion of or commentary on the game, which I think most people are a little tired of (bananas taped to walls etc), or it's a kind of scam (artists claiming other people's decisions as if they made them, as with lazier ai art).
I certainly agree with your point that creative decision-making can be involved in any image making, including with ai, and it's perfectly possible for someone acting with enough intentionality and sensibility to create art we might appreciate as moves in the aforementioned game.
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