Is AI art art?

Antoine Gagné

— 2 min read
Is AI art art?

There's a highly debated idea around the concept of AI art - whether it's truly art or not. My stance on it is that: AI making images isn't art. Humans wielding AI tools to generate images CAN be art.

Definitions:
: skill acquired by experience, study, or observation
: the conscious use of skill and creative imagination especially in the production of aesthetic objects

If we follow these definitions, hand-picked for relevance from a larger list, the AI:

  • Clearly did a lot of observations
  • Can hardly be thought of having a conscious creative imagination process.

You could ask the AI to generate an aesthetic image, but its objective would be fulfilling your request for an aesthetic image, not the aesthetism itself.

On the other hand, the human:

  • Can experience, study and observe what works and what doesn't to have the AI generate "nice-looking" images.
  • Can conscientiously apply skill and creative imagination in manoeuvring the AI so it generates nice images.

I think a lot of people are (justifiably) angry at the scale of the theft of image data and ethics. If the world had been fair, these companies wouldn't have gotten away with it and "AI art" wouldn't exist.

But they did get away with it.

Let's look at it from a slightly different point of view: by some definitions, an "art" is a complex, nuanced and expert application of a skill. And a skill implies a "thing" that can be studied, explored, mastered. I'm telling you, there can be a lot of depth, nuance in AI art.

Consider these two images:

Create a picture of a man in the rain. Make it beautiful. Landscape mode.
A black-and-white photograph of a working-class New York man in the early 1940s, standing in the rain. He wears a heavy wool overcoat with broad shoulders, a fedora pulled low, and holds a cigarette between his fingers. Low-key lighting with hard shadows and strong chiaroscuro contrast shapes his face and coat. The composition uses the rule of thirds with generous negative space, evoking quiet tension and postwar fatigue. Shot in landscape orientation with shallow depth of field. Authentic 1940s film rendering: pronounced silver-halide grain, soft highlight bloom, slightly crushed blacks, muted midtones, subtle lens vignetting, and minor optical imperfections consistent with large-format street photography of the era. Moody, restrained, documentary realism.

In a their own way, both images are good-looking. But the second one was steered, manoeuvred in a much more conscious way. It has info about specific techniques, composition, rendering. It adds a backstory to the character. As I was working on this image, the prompt would be followed in weird ways, certain details omitted. I refined the prompt a couple times and even sent reference pictures from the 40's to help steer the model in generating this one.

This feels like an artistic process to me.

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