Is AI art really creating or just remixing? A debate I keep having

I was at a local gallery opening in Portland last month and saw two pieces side by side. One was done by hand over 3 weeks, the other by a guy who typed a prompt into Midjourney in 10 minutes. The AI piece won the crowd vote, and honestly it did look better. But that got me thinking: if the AI just pulled from millions of existing images, is that the same as what a human artist does when they learn from their influences? I lean toward saying intent matters more than the tool. What do you all think, does the source of the creativity change the value?

2 comments

2 Comments

hill.barbara5d ago

That whole "intent matters" argument falls apart when you look at how humans actually learn to make art. Every painter who studied the masters was doing the same thing the AI does - absorbing patterns, color schemes, and compositions from thousands of works they saw. The difference is the AI doesn't pretend it's having a spiritual experience while doing it. But here's the angle people skip: what about the person who trained the model, chose the dataset, and curated the output? That's still a human making choices about what gets generated. The guy typing prompts is just the last step in a chain of human decisions. So the real question isn't if it's art, it's who gets credit for the final piece.

reese_patel5d ago

The tool is just the tool, man. A human who learns from their influences is still choosing what to pull from and combining it with their own experiences and feelings. The AI doesn't have the "feeling" part, it's just pattern matching. I'd bet the guy who won that crowd vote didn't have to worry about messing up a brushstroke or running out of a specific paint color, which is kind of the whole point of doing it by hand in a lot of ways. Intent and the process behind the final image are what give it weight, not just the pretty picture at the end.