I get where you’re coming from about human involvement in AI art. But consider this: the artist isn’t just dropping a prompt and walking away. They’re often curating the dataset, fine-tuning the model, and making tons of decisions that influence the final piece. It’s kind of like a movie director who shapes every scene even if they’re not on camera.
Also, AI art usually isn’t a one-shot deal. Artists go through multiple iterations, making tweaks and changes to get to the final result. Think of it as sculpting, chipping away until it feels right. It takes hundreds if not thousands of different tries with prompts.
And don’t underestimate the prompt. A well-crafted prompt can guide the AI in ways that make the end product unique and meaningful. So while the AI is a tool, the human is still very much the artist here.
You ring up your artist friend and would really like to see this specific thing drawn. Your friend gets inspired and is happy to oblige completely for free as they make art for fun. You give them specifications, they send you progress pictures and you tell them how to tweak those WIP pictures until you get the piece you envisioned, drawn by this artist friend of yours.
Now, who owns the work? The artist, right? You don’t get to claim ownership just because your instructions got that piece done.
And yet that effort to make something from AI is trivial compared to the effort required to become a professional artist or photographer. If I commission art from a human, I’m curating and fine-tuning the output by browsing the artist’s gallery, deciding which artist to commission based on their art style, deciding on a prompt to give the artist, and revising the output by adjusting my prompt based on the artist’s preliminary sketch. Yet despite all that effort, I don’t get the copyright for the completed artwork, because I didn’t make it.
I wholeheartedly and completely reject the notion that human creativity has any more than de minimis influence on AI art. It’s no more a tool than an actual live artist is a tool.
I get where you’re coming from about human involvement in AI art. But consider this: the artist isn’t just dropping a prompt and walking away. They’re often curating the dataset, fine-tuning the model, and making tons of decisions that influence the final piece. It’s kind of like a movie director who shapes every scene even if they’re not on camera.
Also, AI art usually isn’t a one-shot deal. Artists go through multiple iterations, making tweaks and changes to get to the final result. Think of it as sculpting, chipping away until it feels right. It takes hundreds if not thousands of different tries with prompts.
And don’t underestimate the prompt. A well-crafted prompt can guide the AI in ways that make the end product unique and meaningful. So while the AI is a tool, the human is still very much the artist here.
I think about it along this analogy:
You ring up your artist friend and would really like to see this specific thing drawn. Your friend gets inspired and is happy to oblige completely for free as they make art for fun. You give them specifications, they send you progress pictures and you tell them how to tweak those WIP pictures until you get the piece you envisioned, drawn by this artist friend of yours.
Now, who owns the work? The artist, right? You don’t get to claim ownership just because your instructions got that piece done.
And yet that effort to make something from AI is trivial compared to the effort required to become a professional artist or photographer. If I commission art from a human, I’m curating and fine-tuning the output by browsing the artist’s gallery, deciding which artist to commission based on their art style, deciding on a prompt to give the artist, and revising the output by adjusting my prompt based on the artist’s preliminary sketch. Yet despite all that effort, I don’t get the copyright for the completed artwork, because I didn’t make it.
I wholeheartedly and completely reject the notion that human creativity has any more than de minimis influence on AI art. It’s no more a tool than an actual live artist is a tool.