AI-Generated Art is Art Direction. It is Not Art
We can respect the creativity of AI-generated art without comparing it to art created by the human hand.
Every artist has a childhood memory of when they first realized they had a gift. While other kids were tracing, we could look at something once, hold it in our mind’s eye, and reproduce it on paper. Our nightmares were more vivid, our memories more unmoveable, and our journals filled with more phantasmagoria.
At first, this gift was nothing more than a parlor trick. Classmates would approach us and ask us to draw something. The jocks could run fast. The pretty ones made friends easily. And the artists could seduce with our hands.
Art made us feel special. Until it did not.
In first grade, I had a stomach-churching girl crush on the most popular girl in school. One day, she came up to my desk, looked down at me, and with her perfect French braids never budging an inch, she spoke to me for the first time.
Draw me something.
So, in under three minutes, I drew a perfect likeness of her as a blue mermaid.
She traced the lines of my sketch with one tiny finger as if reading braille, smiled, and, from that day forward, became my new best friend…
