@TheIgnorantSavage @rustoleumlove @Gustodon You’ve spent so much time dodging the question by swapping in taste, labour, and status and calling it philosophy.
You still you don’t address a contradiction you refuse to resolve. You insist intent exists in sampling and other derivative practices but vanishes the moment an LLM is involved, even while acknowledging human prompting, selection, rejection, and deployment.
That doesn’t cohere. Tools don’t have intent. People do. Depth and aesthetic quality are value judgements layered on afterward, not prerequisites for agency.
And to be explicit, this isn’t about my desire to use generative AI. It’s about your refusal to address that contradiction. Each time it’s raised, you pivot to taste or contempt instead of answering it.
That avoidance is a big tell.
I don’t care if generative AI exists.
If it collapses, gets regulated out, or proves useless, fine. Oh well.
What I don’t like are contradictions, gatekeeping, and techno-puritanism pretending to be ethics.
The “is AI art or not” debate collapses the moment you watch how IP holders behave. They’re not suing AI companies into oblivion. Instead, they’re licensing, investing, and monetizing.
When remixing happens without permission, it’s theft. When remixing happens inside a system they profit from, it’s innovation. Same act. Different cheque. That already tells you everything you need to know.
That said, when it comes to the “is AI art” debate, the philosophical escape hatch—the one everyone leans on—is intent. Humans have it. AI doesn’t. Sounds clean—supposedly. Except, when humans use AI, they have intent.
Which is why the supposed difference between AI and every other tool based on derivative works—such as sampling, collaging, quoting, etc.—doesn’t survive contact.
Intent doesn’t live in tools. Samplers don’t have it. Cameras don’t. DAWs don’t. LLMs don’t. People do.
If someone is prompting, re-prompting, rejecting outputs, selecting results, and deploying them for a purpose, intent exists. You don’t accidentally iterate. Complaining that the machine does all the work while also complaining people are prompting wrong is just holding two incompatible ideas at once. Pick one.
When that contradiction shows up, the argument mutates. Now it’s about quality. Or effort. Or struggle. Or depth. Or audience response. Or how it feels wrong.
None of that matters. Bad art is still intentional. Lazy choices are still choices. Audience response is downstream. Art doesn’t exist because people like it. It exists because someone made it. If struggle or popularity were required, most art history wouldn’t qualify.
None of this is new for me. This is the same position I’ve held for years. Composition over technique. Exploration over purity. Feeling over formula.
Tools don’t matter. Credentials don’t matter. Approved processes don’t matter. That’s why purity tests set off alarms.
Once you strip them away, the debate stops being about art and starts being about power. One rule for individuals. Another for systems backed by capital. Funny how that keeps happening.
RE: https://atomicpoet.org/objects/1d743389-00c1-48fc-932d-9a35cddb3442
