Setting aside the usual arguments on the anti- and pro-AI art debate and the nature of creativity itself, perhaps the negative reaction that the Redditor encountered is part of a sea change in opinion among many people that think corporate AI platforms are exploitive and extractive in nature because their datasets rely on copyrighted material without the original artists’ permission. And that’s without getting into AI’s negative drag on the environment.
Ah, very interesting that you want to focus on photography as a comparison. To me, this just infers that you are not familiar with the type of choices that photographers do make, creatively. Just because they have endless amounts of subject matter readily available at their disposal, does not make the process any easier or different than other types of art.
Photographers still consider composition, lighting, area of focus, color, etc. Along with a large amount of other factors such as camera body, filmback, lens, fstop, iso, flash, supplemental lighting, post-processing, the list goes on.
Again, all of these choices are actively made when creating the work - using one’s critical thinking, decision making, experience and knowledge to inform each choice and how it will affect the outcome.
Generative AI is not that and will never be that, no matter how much you argue otherwise. You are entering a prompt, the model is interpreting that and generating a result that it calculates to be most statistically accurate. Your choice of words are not artistic choices, they are at most, requests or instructions. If you iterate, you are not in control of what changes. You only find out what has changed after the result has been generated.
Again, you are totally missing the point to the Fountain and using it as a false equivalence. It was made as a critique of the art world, to show the absurdity of what art critics said was valid art at the time. Whereas today, generative AI is not being made as a critique to anything. It’s being made for profit, to replaced skilled labor and using the work of the same people it’s trying to replace. Hopefully you can see how the two are different.
If you think that’s the case then you don’t understand the medium. Once you’ve explored a model, seen into its mind, understand how it understands things, you can direct it quite precisely. At least as precisely as a photographer taking a picture of a tree – yes, if you care about the arrangement of leaves then it might take a couple of tries until the wind moves them just right but you’ve made a point of going to the right tree, in the right season, on a day with the right weather, at a time with the right light.
I’m not claiming that. There’s an incidental artistry in the sense that now some progressives have their underwear in a twist just as conservatives had theirs in a twist about Fountain but I’ll readily grant that there was no human intent behind it. Sometimes it’s not artists who troll people but the general machinations of the world. Still worthy of appreciation but calling it “art” is not a hill I would die on.
What I’m claiming is that you can’t judge art by the level of craft involved: It can be zero and still be art. Any argument involving craft is literally missing the point of what art is.