I've never liked the argument that there's some imaginary line between the acceptibility of AI as a tool for creating art and Photoshop/Krita/Procreate/etc as a tool for creating art.

Rubbing a brush on a canvas was good enough for the renaissance masters, why are we collectively okay with modern "artists" using "virtual brushes" and trivializations of the expressive experience like "undo" when it's not "real art" because they're leaning so heavily on the uncaring unthinking machine and the convenience in creation it offers rather than suffering through the human limitations that the old masters did? Are photographers not artists too then, because they're not actually creating, just instead capturing a view of what's already there?

The usual response to this is some trite response about how AI is 'different' because you're 'just' throwing prompts at it and its completely creating the output itself -- as if it's inconceivable that there might be someone who doesn't just shovel out raw outputs from an AI and call it 'art' and is instead actually using it in a contributatory role on a larger composition that they, themselves, as a human, are driving and making artistic decisions on.

E33 is a perfect example here. Is the artistic merit of the overall work lessened by it having used AI in part of its creation? Does anyone really, truly believe that they abdicated their vision on the overall work to machines?

Just because someone can drag and drop to draw a circle in an image editing app instead of using their own talent and ability to freehand it instead doesn't mean what they then go on to do with that circle isn't artistic.

We do make this argument all the time though. Film is probably the number one example in my mind. After actors, we celebrate directors more than any other individual in film. Directors often don’t write the script. They don’t handle the camera or the lighting or sound. They don’t create the music. They don’t do the editing in post. They don’t do the acting. But they do direct all of the people doing those things to achieve an overall vision, and we recognize that has significant artistic merit. Directors are not artists, or cinematographers, or composers, or actors, or visual effects artists, or sound technicians. But they are still artists, because art is more than the technical skill to produce something.

I dislike this argument only when taken to the extreme 'GenAI allows anyone to create arts'. It's like saying 'Ikea allow anyone to be a woodworker'!

I love debating, but I want debate to learn things, not to walk people into traps.

Obviously the woodworker is a person. And you would be on a team that has woodworking as part of their skillset.

But the way you set up your reductio-ad-absurdum it can be read as implying the AI is a person too. O:-)

You know what, rather than just going for a flip rhetorical takedown, what if we took that implication seriously for a second?

What if you did mean to argue that (the) AI is a proto-person. Say you argue that they deserve to be in the credits as a (junior?) member of the team. That'd be wild! A really interesting framing, which I haven't heard before.

Or the weaker version: Use said framing pro-forma as a (practical?) legal fiction. We already have rules on (C) attribution. It might be a useful framing to untangle some of the spaghetti.