fascinating irrelevant anecdote following my debunking of your flimsy narrative. you certainly successfully dodged any onus to respond to the rest of my three paragraph rebuttal i provided besides the word “Rembrandt”.

my point is AI isn’t so much a tool as it is an artist you commission.

> People are just mad that a tool is giving some people better looking art then their lack of skill with the harder to use tools.

this is a gross oversimplification of a very nuanced and valid array of grievances, many of which i’ve illustrated in my contributions to this thread, one of which was already in response to you, so no point in rehashing.

> Just because Al uses no skill to use doesn't make it any less of a tool in this scenario.

it does when art in this context and by definition inherently necessitates skill. if a tool does all the work and requires no skill on behalf of the operator, the operator doesn’t still get to pretend to be a “skilled worker”. as i’ve said before, they’re in essence commissioning an artist to realize their vision. this does not an artist make.

> don't tell wood workers they aren't wood workers cause they use jigs and table saws instead of hand saws and wooden nails.

that’s because the jigs and table saws can’t come up with inspiration and invent a piece of furniture on their own just because you asked them to.

> In almost any other context, this is due to someone taking credit away from another person. In this case there’s nobody besides themselves that was involved.

innumerable people were involved. AI is trained on the blood sweat and tears of untold numbers of truly talented artists and creators. and people falsely claiming to have made something they didn’t make, even if it wasn’t the product of the amalgamation of actual artists’ hard work, rightfully ruffles feathers of people critically analyzing the scenario.

> It really seems like people are just upset that people were able to easily create the work, like getting pissed at people for tracing.

the entire point is they didnt create the work. they objectively did the least amount of work of all components involved in the creation process of the art. they could’ve done as little as copy/paste, and clicked a button. that will of course not sit well with people who understand what goes into the art forms AI relies upon in order to even function in the first place.

and tracing can of course be seen as lazy by some, and context matters. people thought disney was lazy for rotoscoping famous sequences from their early films. but the results were stunning and every frame still requires a great degree of hands on skill. getting all bent out of shape over some kid tracing manga is obviously lame. but criticizing some low effort etsy seller for tracing over people in stock images, omitting all detailed facial features because they’re too hard to replicate, and using the paint bucket tool to fill the figures in, then slapping it on cheap decor with contrived misappropriated inspirational quotes and selling it is seen as hacky and supremely lazy by many, and they have a point. AI art, on the other hand, makes the aforementioned etsy seller look like rembrandt by comparison. as stated, context matters.

i never implied the artist would be the person who developed the AI to begin with. the AI itself is the artist, as it is the amalgamation of whatever resources it is trained on, and is essentially commissioned by a person to create works of art for them.

the individual using the AI is no more an artist than a person requesting a more upbeat song from a busker, or a company commissioning an ad agency to develop content for their brand.

when “the tool” is the entire artistic process, and the individual using the tool does virtually nothing artistic at all to prompt the generation of the art, then the tool is the artist. artists inherently need to meet certain criteria by definition in order to be artists in the technical and classical sense, and in most instance in such AI is employed for art, virtually none of those criteria are met by the person using their token to generate a piece.

a hammer and a nail gun still require a skilled hand to be effective. a more fair comparison is the difference between using a hammer or a nail gun, and hiring a skilled laborer to use a hammer or a nail gun.

as per your last paragraph: what if, as is done in countless instances, one were to train the AI on a specific piece or series of pieces by a specific artist, then ask it to recreate scenes in a facsimile of their style. in instances where people do this and claim credit for the art, or worse yet, profit off of the skills the actual artist developed and the AI emulated, that is orders of magnitude less artistically ethical than using actual artistic skill to draw or paint from a reference image, something almost all artists already do and have done since the advent of the art form.

um, no? haha maybe you need to look up the word “pedantic” as well? please, do explain to me how including an ellipses to unambiguously illustrate i’ve omitted an entirely extraneous and totally irrelevant portion of the definition could possibly be interpreted as pedantry? seriously, i’ll wait. absolutely baffling and extraordinarily transparent attempt to deflect mate, even for you.

> why does this matter to people?

which brings me back to my response answering your first question: the use of “(oc)”, most likely. nobody has to be harmed for people to rightfully call out the undeserved self congratulatory nature of saying “i made this” when actually you used your phone to pay an algorithm to make this amalgamation of talented artists’s work using a text prompt you saw online.

in the vast majority of instances, the “one person involved” as you put it, was involved only in the commissioning of the piece, and was no more a part of the artistic process than some drunk at a bar throwing a buck on the stage and asking the band to play something a little more upbeat. the drunk doesn’t magically become a collaborator in the artistic process. they’re a patron, paying an artist.

the tool is not merely “helpful”. it is the skillset, it is the tools, it is the medium; it is the artist.

> who cares?

anyone who doesn’t appreciate the concept of someone commissioning a piece, then claiming they made it.

would you like to look up the definition of “typically” as well, or shall i explain way a minor, extraneous and contextually irrelevant section of the definition was omitted for simplicity’s sake? what an oddly pedantic thing to wedge in.

art is by many people’s definition inherently a “skill”, and developing skills almost inherently requires overcoming obstacles, in so many words. i don’t personally see anything of value lost by not lowering the artistic bar low enough to accommodate what some people believe to be an art form, but is more akin to a company hiring an advertising agency to develop a campaign around their vision. the average person copy/pasting prompts is no more an artist than the CEO is in the aforementioned scenario. none of this is to say i’m denying that AI art is art. i’m saying (if we ignore the fact that the AI is more or less merely emulating whatever artists it’s trained on) that the AI is the artist, not the individual commissioning the monkey to dance.

you engaged in the textbook definition of argument with me when i answered the questions posed in your original comment:

> noun

> 1 an exchange of diverging or opposite views…

you’re also using deliberately loaded words like “difficulty” and “barriers” in such a manner as to deflect away from the point that any attempt to build competency in any art form is a part of what makes it an art by most definitions. if that entails a degree of “difficulty”, it’s incidental to the actual skillset developed in the process.

i’m not sure why someone would find that “weird”. anyone involved seriously in any art form knows how expensive professional grade gear often is compared to entry level. it’s not like art can’t be made with inexpensive equipment, but the vast majority of serous professional artists, even hobbiests, invest small fortunes in their equipment.

also you seem to have been too busy clumsily cherry-picking my mere mentioning of “expense” to notice the numerous physical and cerebral elements which define the art form i listed for you, but best not to let a little thing like arguing in good faith get in the way of winning said argument.

photography OC: someone needs to have a trained artistic eye to frame a balanced shot, be on location of whatever it is they are photographing, own or rent expensive camera and lighting equipment, and in most professional examples, expensive lenses, a full editing suite they’ve mastered, and an understanding of how exposure/f-stop works. that’s not even getting into analogue photography and dark room chemical mastery.

the physical button press is probably the least crucial step, and isn’t remotely comparable to someone popping out their phone to copy/paste a prompt they saw someone else do, then picking their nose whilst waiting for the art machine to pump out their new “OC” to mint on opensea.

i think it’s the use of “(oc)” in the title that rubs people the wrong way. but in this particular case, OP’s process is hands-on enough that his use of SD resulted in a final product that’s more OC than most people who, in many cases, are stringing chains of words into an AI trained on actual artists’ work, clicking the “make art” button, then calling the highly detailed and painterly image it renders “OC”.