I’m an artist. I work in a range of mediums - watercolor, digital, glue and ephemera, and tea a couple of times. I’ve made prints with linocut and plate, dabbled in photography and dance, and spent a very short amount of time singing in a band. I don’t question the authenticity of myself as an artist. The tools change, but the ability to make something remains.
A question being raised now is whether AI generated art is actually art, and if the people generating the art are artists.
I’m going to go out on a limb and say that they are not, because their status on artist is completely reliant on that one particular tool. The only thing you’re actually creating is a prompt to put in a tool - and the AI is doing the rest of the work. Remove access to Midjourney and you’re left with nothing more than a clever wordsmith at best.
Anyone whose been making art for awhile knows that access to better tools makes for better art - higher quality paint is easier to work with, better quality brushes give you better control of the paint you apply to a canvas, digital images created in Procreate or Photoshop are a world away from those created in Microsoft Paint.
I’ve been thinking about this for a long time, particularly in reference to when Adobe Photoshop really started kicking off an an illustrative tool in the early aughts and the emotionally violent backlash from artists in traditional mediums who decried the notion that a digital image could be considered “art” - there was also a rash of “artists” whose entire portfolios consisted of photoshop filters jammed on top of mediocre photography, and these images were novel and trendy for half a minute before they became worse than mundane and the community at large learned to recognize them for what they were.
What art is or isn’t is one of those questions may be best left to philosophy, and I do have a small pile of books on aesthetics that have recently been bumped higher up on my “to read” list; and maybe now the more relevant question is “What is an artist?” I am not a mathematician for the possession of a calculator. I am not a chef because I can pull together a meal from things I found in the back of the pantry. Throwing a series of words together doesn’t make you a writer, even if you are writing. And throwing a series of words in an AI art generator doesn’t make you an artist.
AI generated art is here and it’s not going anywhere - but once more artists start really using it what they make is going to blow these early breathes of existence away in ways we can’t image right now.