Oh the Ai art generator has no "soul" and it's soy and reddit? This precious art form (illustrating things that other people pay you to, a medium dominated almost entirely by furries, porn, and furry porn) is being destroyed by the evil AI? I'm sorry that the democratization of art creation is so upsetting to you. I've brought dozens of ideas to life by typing words into a prompt and I didn't have to pay someone $300 to do so.
What does this mean materially? Can you look at art and discern whether experiences have been added?
It's not about whether you can tell from a finished product whether an AI or a human made it - that's not really the core point. The point is that the only thing the AI can draw from is other people's art - making it essentially a big plagiarism machine. Humans, on the other hand, can make art without reference - somebody had to invent it, after all. Not to mention human artists capable of creating and refining entire styles - the work of HR Geiger, for example, which had a very unique style that wasn't really prevalent before. Humans can create, whereas these AI can only derive.
What happens when a novel art style emerges from the use of AI art? We've already seen new, emergent forms of body horror. I just really don't see what's so special about human experience in the equation. Am I not bringing my own human element to the creation with my prompting?
No the point is that you're stealing other peoples' art to make the model. Your prompt on its own is just that - a prompt. The AI cannot fulfill that prompt unless it's able to steal from a bunch of pre-existing artworks, which is what I take issue with.
And there's not an artist alive who hasn't stolen from another artist in honing their craft.
That isn't necessarily relevant. If you found someone who had never seen any kind of drawing or painting in their life, showed them how to use a pencil, and told them to draw a castle, you would get a sensible result. This is because humans are capable of making art without solely copying others. You can't do that with an AI - if you gave them no images to train with, you'd just get random noise. This is evidence that humans can add something original to art while AI cannot.
And what about a blind human? Why does the human get to train on visual representations of castles while the AI doesn't?
Moreover, that human has probably never seen a castle in person. In all likelihood, they have seen other people's photographs and drawings of castles, none of which they have paid for.