I don't know, all my alarms just go off when someone tells me AI can do 'art'. To my knowleadge AI, at this stage, doesn't know what a cat is when you ask for a drawing of a cat.
I’m no expert in aesthetics, but I do know that one of the big bones of contention in that subject is how much, if anything, authorial intent has to do with something being art. If authorial intent isn’t essential then there doesn’t seem any in principle reason why AIs shouldn’t create art, but if it is then unless and until AI develops the ability to have intentions, humans might be able to use AI as a tool to create art but AI wouldn’t be able to create art spontaneously.
The examples of AI art I’m aware of to date fit more into the tool-for-artists mould, where someone has specified elements of the images and then selected the one(s) that they think could be presented as art from a bunch of less successful images. If found objects can be art because of the intent of the artist in selecting and presenting them, then I’d see no reason why images created by AIs couldn’t also be, but I also wouldn’t see this process as proving AI could itself create art.
But I’m sure there are plenty of developments on this front that I’m not aware of, and possibly examples that are more compellingly of AI creating art from scratch.
The big problem of arguing this angle is that at the end of the day what constitutes "actual, genuine, real, human art" is relevant only for a minuscule fraction of the people who will make use of these tools.
And it will matter less and less as they will improve over time and people will need to be warned upfront about what's genuine and what not.
A lot of people will be perfectly fine with "Sure, let's say this isn't real art. Still serves perfectly well any purpose I needed this image for".
Case in point: I regularly organize boxing events and I have a friend of mine, a good artist, often working on my posters for any fight night. Being a close friend who trains at my gym he also refuses to ask for or accept any compensation, but the downside is that I can't really pressure him to doing me the favor at will when I'm on a tight deadline.
It's also a very low profit activity (it's amateur boxing, we are lucky when we get few hundred euros above breaking even and sometimes we closed the night with a red balance), so "hiring a well paid professional artist" to do the job isn't even a viable option for me.
Most other gyms/boxing clubs in our region don't even bother with this stuff and just slap some poorly photoshopped pictures of their athletes on the poster and call it a day. "Artsy vintage posters" are a bit of our distinctive mark in this area.
Do you think the day something like Midjourney will get good enough at doing depictions of athletes in action I will have any sort of moral reservation about "using art that is not genuine"?
I won't give a flying fuck, because it's some throw-away stuff that will need to be quickly replaced a week or two later and no one will ever remember the day after the event.
And I'll be glad to be able to get by without pestering a friend every two weeks or so, if I can help it.
