Unpopular Opinion
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I suppose it would depend on who the "artist" is considered to be at the end.
Say for instance I had an idea that I wanted a painting of Sir Issac Newton wearing a cowboy hat and riding a mechanical bull, and I commission a painter to create my vision. Instead of using paints or pencils or anything to create the image the painter goes online and downloads a bunch of pictures of Isaac Newton and mechanical bulls and collages them together in a way that looks kind of like an original painting.
Who is the artist in that case? It's not me, since I didn't make anything. It's not the painter since they didn't actually create anything original, they just stole a bunch of pictures someone else took. It's not the people who made the original images that the painter stole since they never even agreed to be part of any of it.
We hit the same dilemma with AI. The person putting in the prompts hasn't really "created" anything. The AI engine hasn't created anything either, it just takes parts of other existing works. The people who made the original works had no say in any of how their work was used.
How is that "art"?
I love playing with AI to make silly images or even workshop ideas for things I might do in the future, but I wouldn't call it "art"
I disagree with the premise that such mosaic of online pictures wouldn't be "original" piece of art. It absolutely qualifies by my books
Who is the artist though?
One who wrote the prompt. It may be the AI that does all the heavy lifting but it's still a tool and alone it doesn't create anything.
But the person who wrote the prompts didn't create anything. With AI there really is no "artist".
How did they not create anything? They inserted a prompt into the tool and received a picture.
They had a rough idea and left it to the AI to make any sense of it and "create" something.
Painters can either splash paint on the canvas or spend months working on a photorealistic masterpiece. There's absolutely a difference in skill needed for both but to claim the former is not art would also be gatekeeping.
That argument also disregards the actual difficulty of crafting the perfect prompt to get the AI to output what you want it to. Anyone can create pictures with it but it's not trivial to get it to create exactly what you want.
I would like to hear what you consider a perfect prompt.
Perfect is probably exaggerated but what I mean is the promp that produces the exact outcome you were looking for. Generative AI can produce very high quality pictures with a simple prompt but if you're an artist with an exact vision in mind, it not so easy anymore to get AI to produce that for you.
There isn't really the exact outcome one was looking for. Not even with a super detailed prompt aided by a control net. LLMs are super imprecise here.
by extension this would make the comissioner of an art piece an artist as well? Sorry but thats just a wrong assumption. The LLM would be the "artist" in this case as it pieced together the collage, blended it together and then presented it to the prompter for refinement.
This is slightly off topic because we're now discussing who the artist is, not wether it's considered art.
My personal opinion on the matter is that artist is not a tool so by prompting them it's still them whose creating the art piece. At best it would be considered a collaboration. The output is still art. I argue that the output of human and AI collaboration is also art.
I didn't went for "what is considered art" though?
For the commissioner the artists is well for this process a tool. For the prompter the LLM is also considered in this process as a tool. The commissioner didn't do the art and neither did the prompter; they simply recieve the end/in progress art.
What I hear you saying is that generative AI is the artist, not the one writing the prompt.
I'm fine by that. It's not exactly how I see it but I have no argument against. It's not what this thread is about.
I'm sure Terry Gilliam will be very sad to learn that collage isn't art...