At the risk of sounding like a pedant, even if the dude hadn't animated this specific scene, or worked on the show, derivative artwork is still artwork, the same way a collage, a remix, hell, a Linkin Park Dragon Ball Z AMV (I may be showing my internet age with that last one) are art. Doing variations on a theme by using existing characters/artwork/ideas/whatever is as old as human expression itself, and memes are not exempt from that, they're just an expression of an increasingly online, media consumption-oriented, globalized culture.
Authorship is 100% not the same as ownership, and only IP-obsessed nerds and bean counters actually care about the second. The whole issue of authorship is only trickier when it comes to AI art because the relationship between technical ability and tool usage is more visible: who's the author of an AI artwork? The person feeding the machine a text prompt? The person/team who trained the Machine-learning algorithm to produce art that looks a certain way? The person/team who developed the algorithm in the first place? The authors of all the pictures/data the model used to train/validate its results?
I'm no art theorist, but I do recognize that procedurally created "art" puts our understanding of what makes art "art" to the test, and forces us to ask ourselves old questions about new artworks.
TL;DR: even if the guy hadn't worked on the show, lib technobro is still wrong about authorship and art.
At the risk of sounding like a pedant, even if the dude hadn't animated this specific scene, or worked on the show, derivative artwork is still artwork, the same way a collage, a remix, hell, a Linkin Park Dragon Ball Z AMV (I may be showing my internet age with that last one) are art. Doing variations on a theme by using existing characters/artwork/ideas/whatever is as old as human expression itself, and memes are not exempt from that, they're just an expression of an increasingly online, media consumption-oriented, globalized culture.
Authorship is 100% not the same as ownership, and only IP-obsessed nerds and bean counters actually care about the second. The whole issue of authorship is only trickier when it comes to AI art because the relationship between technical ability and tool usage is more visible: who's the author of an AI artwork? The person feeding the machine a text prompt? The person/team who trained the Machine-learning algorithm to produce art that looks a certain way? The person/team who developed the algorithm in the first place? The authors of all the pictures/data the model used to train/validate its results?
I'm no art theorist, but I do recognize that procedurally created "art" puts our understanding of what makes art "art" to the test, and forces us to ask ourselves old questions about new artworks.
TL;DR: even if the guy hadn't worked on the show, lib technobro is still wrong about authorship and art.