alt Hacker NewsI'm pretty sure people have created images via random physical processes, then selected the best ones, and people have called it "art." That's no different than cherry picking AI generated images that resonate. The only difference is the anti-generative AI crusade being spearheaded by gatekeepers who want to keep their technical skills scarce in their own interests.
I think one could still point out a little difference: Random physical processes do usually not involve mix and matching millions of other people's works. Instead, something new in every aspect and its origin can emerge.
It feels like AI art is often just a version of: "I take all the things and mix them! You can't tell which original work that tree is taken from! Tiihiiihi!"
Where "tree" stands for any aspect of arbitrary size. The relationship is not that direct, of course, because all the works gen AI learns from kind of gets mixed in the weights of edges in the ANN. Nevertheless, the output is still some kind of mix of the stuff it learned from, even if it is not necessarily recognizable as such any longer. It is in the nature of how these things work.