Have you ever heard the saying that there are only 4 or 5 stories in the world? That’s basically what you’re arguing, and we’re getting into heavy philosophical areas here.

The difference is in the process. Anybody can take a photo, but it takes knowledge and experience to be a photographer. An artist understands concepts in the way that a physicist understands the rules that govern particles. The issue with AI isn’t that it’s derivative in the sense that “everything old is new again” or “nature doesn’t break her own laws,” it’s derivative in the sense that it merely regurgitates a collage of vectorized arrays of its training data. Even somebody who lives in a cave would understand how light falls and could extrapolate that knowledge to paint a sunset if you told them what a sunset is like. Given A and B, you can figure out C. The image generators we have today don’t understand how light works, even with all the images on the internet to examine. They can give you sets of A, B, and AB, but never C. If I draw a line and then tell you to draw a line, your line and my line will be different even though they’re both lines. If you tell an image generator to draw a line, it’ll spit out what is effectively a collage of lines from its training set.

And even this would only matter in terms of prompters saying that they are artists because they wrote the phrase that caused the tool to generate an image, but we live in a world where we must make money to live, and the way that the companies that make these tools work amounts to wage theft.

AI is like a camera. It’s a tool that will spawn entirely new genres of art and be used to improve the work of artists in many other areas. But like any other tool, it can be put together and used ethically or unethically, and that’s where the issues lie.

AI bros say that it’s like when the camera was first invented and all the painters freaked out. But that’s a strawman. Artists are asking, “Is a man not entitled to the sweat of his brow?”