I don’t think it is as extreme as this.
What is your 'artistic ‘soul’? Is it not the sum of your experiences? You have gathered in your experiences, and learned to recognise patterns, sequences, and consequences. The process has been going on all your life, and you are probably unable to manage the individual attributions. When you or I create, we do not consciously rip off stuff from other people, and yet what comes out must somehow depend on what went in. AI is the same most of the time. And when it isn’t, it is because it has only a finite amount of data to draw from.
Here’s an example. I remember seeing a picture of a black cat, taken from an angle where it looks like a crow. I type ‘cat looking like a crow’ and up that image pops. If you put in a description of a friend’s image of David Bowie, you might be able to fish a generous approximation of that original picture out of the AI, because it is the only good fit to the description.
It is still presumptuous to call it ‘Artificial Intelligence’. It is a tiny bit of the brain. Our brains train themselves as we go. Google and others have trained their systems with immense databases of annotated images, and then lets others use their fixed, pre-trained network within their own AI models. My own experiments with AI failed because I could to get enough source data to train it, so I could sometimes recognise the traits of particular examples in the training data.
The real, clear and present miracle is not the mock-paintings: it is the system itself. Since Ada Lovelace, we have believed a calculating engine of sufficient complexity could mimic a ‘soul’, whatever that is. We have not done that. I am not sure we will. But we can. Maybe this will tell us more about ourselves and how we think. Perhaps the ‘soul’ is not that mysterious after all.
Exactly- they’re not true artists if they disagree with you.
I’m Non Fungible.
I thought you put the fun in the fungible!
Maybe - but I have no idea what a gible is 
JFC everything is a Pokémon.
Everything about this is interesting. I’m an artist and even have some education in the area, for those who believe there are things that can be learned through formal education. I think art is people-magic and so when technology changes then art just changes with it along with the people. IMO no one should worry so much about reproduction or origination unless they want to make an angsty youtube video. When the paradigm changes in art people just make different art for different reasons.
I think ai can/will eventually cut into some opportunities for working artists, sure. Still, I think it will have both positive and negative applications altogether and don’t feel like anything I personally do as an artist is impacted in the least.
Just my random morning thoughts though.
As a historian, I can pretty safely say that anyone thinking they can predict the future with certainty is going to look very silly in the near future…
That’s a pretty specific psychoanalysis of a whole class of people whom we’ve never met and who weren’t even talking to us in the first place 
Well I don’t know about you, but it’s always fascinating to me to read the opinions of people that call themselves critical thinkers. Oh that sweet ASMR-inducing edginess!
It doesn’t learn in the way that humans do. What it does is categorise a bunch of images that are described as “dramatic lighting from the top left” as being at one coordinate in a multi-dimensional space and then, when you type in something similar it creates a ton of pictures and calculates which one is closest to this point and goes on from there.
It doesn’t, like a human artist, think “lighting from there would be good here because it evokes the early romantic landscape painters but contrasts with my subject matter”. Unless you did that thinking and that is why you put it in your prompt. But either way, the AI knows nothing about the history of Caspar David Friedrich and William Turner and the concept of the sublime in romanticism. Nor does it know what it wants to invoke in the audience by using high contrast rather than muted colours to create what we would call “drama”.
And as long as you rant about people shunning new technology that threatens their livelihoods: remember that the Luddites and saboteurs of yore may look quaint and ridiculous to us now, but they arguably did the right thing for their own well-being: living conditions for the working poor were horrible during the Industrial Revolution. They, their children and even their grandchildren had it worse than they would have had it without the spinning jenny.
Both actually. There really was an AI-uprising in the Dune universe, but also as you mention the concern of the effect of machines on people akin to the current concern about smartphones. The name “Butlerian Jihad”, while it was given an in-universe origin by someone of that name, actually is referring to 19th century novelist Samuel Butler who wrote in his essay “Darwin among the Machines” about the possibility of machines evolving beyond humanity and the dire consequences of that including the Terminator possibility a century before James Cameron. He later wrote a novel Erehwon about a seemingly primitive society that turns out to have once been advanced but abandoned technology deliberately.
It is collage - with (in most examples limited and clumsy) context, shape-form, relationship and lighting awareness. Or more succinctly, it’s collage + auto-complete.
I’m not worried about the new auto-image-mashup generators, (calling it A.I. is misleading and historically aberrant per (even fairly recent) earlier understandings of the term), it’s just marketing to call it that at this point). And I have seen excellent creative applications already, (and no doubt perception-workers will continue to use and develop these tools to great advantage). What is a bit worrisome is the over-attribution of concepts of intelligence and intentionality and originality to these techniques (in the sense of a quality heretofore uniquely possessed by sentient agents) - that misunderstanding will only lead to bad ends - whether it’s by advocates or detractors.
A.I. is the new term for “computer”
This used to be called “computer-generated art”
This is an action by volunteer moderators overseeing that particular subreddit, not an official policy by Reddit the company. So, not really comparable.
Whatever you do, keep your giblets inside you!
