Something I'll never fully understand about the AI "art" community is the fact that almost nobody sees half of what art really is.
What I've seen so often is people seemingly focusing on the end result of the illustration or what it can offer in terms of value, how much you can get out of it without putting too much into it, and that destroys the first half of art-- being the creation of it.
Art isn't just the end result or the final product. It isn't the finished piece, whatever that piece might be. Rather, I believe it only to be half, while the other half is the process itself. It's like a cake, in a way; a cake might be what you want, but you can't get that without the eggs, the flour, the baking powder, the vanilla, etc. For some recipes you have to combine things in certain ways (keeping the dry ingredients and the wet ingredients separate, for instance). And even so, someone might have their own cake recipe that doesn't follow what's in a cookbook or something online and it still works even though it might seem absolutely absurd.
That's what half of the art is-- it's the process of its creation just as much as it is the final product.
Because what goes into the process of its creation isn't just the components, such as paints, pencils, pens, tape, glue, stickers, glitter, digital layers and filters and what have you. It's the person or people making the creation and their experiences.
I believe the human soul to be like a lump of clay. Everybody has a soul and life shapes and alters that soul by adding to it or chipping away at it and that soul will then reflect the human experience unique to the individual. They're all strange and unique shapes, and for artistic expression, those souls can shape what the art itself can be.
Which is why AI cannot make art. It's an algorithm designed to take images that closely suit whatever words you've given to it and mishmash them together in such a way that might resemble what you're asking for, without the human imprint of experience. (Which is plagiarism).
All art must go through the human soul-filter of experience, something AI will never have. AI has never personally experienced anything human and that's why nothing it makes will never be art. Grok will never have a birthday. ChatGPT will never have a best friend. Claude will never admire a sunset. Gemini will never try something new and fun and discover that it likes that. They will never experience euphoria, heartbreak, rage, anxiety, melancholy, distress, joy, contentment, trauma, or injustice.
AI is only able to take from the final products of somebody else's artwork and stitch it together into something that even the AI doesn't quite understand. It doesn't get the other half of the art, which is the creation of it that goes through the human-clay-soul-filter-thing.
Which is why AI will never truly replace human art.
