The use of generative AI in making art

“If you could create an entire video with just text prompts, would you? What’s in the medium of programming, that’s anything other than a hinderance to the artists ideas?”

I guess it depends on what you're doing buddy.

Art requires the imposition of form on matter. Tools which ease this imposition are good.

But if, say, you are a painter, the composition and other physical details of the painting is a core part of what your art should regulate. You aren't painting if you have a machine contrive these elements for you. Tools which ease the imposition of a form a person has conceived are good for art; tools which replace the artist’s own conceiving the work are contrary to the nature of art, which consists essentially in the regulation of matter by an individual nature born in the mind of the artist.

I think in a general sense, all else aside, if one guy could execute his idea using AI instead of, say, a team of menial laborers working for cash, then that would be good. It isn't the execution that constitutes the art (much less when the work is executed by disinterested parties for profit), it is the conception.

But a core part of that conception is its relation to [regulation of] the very matter it informs. It is and cannot be indifferently related to any varied matter (if, as a work of art, it is an new creature or individual nature, not an abstract formal part).

So, if you just have a theme for your video or game, and the machine goes and devises each shot and its composition and camera angle that is deficient. But supposing you had in your mind exactly how it should be in its physical details, and a machine could implement these for you [instead of human workers], that seems to me to be good [for art], or at least not necessarily deleterious.

The point is your idea, precisely insofar as it regulates the matter of your chosen medium, is central to art. Someone or something else might execute the idea with no violence to your art. But, if you offload the conception, or how it regulates matter, to a machine, this is contrary to the nature of art.

I think generative AI could make it possible for someone who is purely a visual artist to make a video game, say… which is good. I don’t think knowing how to program is anything but an impediment to expressing an idea in the case of making a game.

There are considerations beyond art. Further, the whole world is loaded to the brim with things we create which are not as such "art". An artwork is a new creature born in the mind of an artist for the sole purpose of being beautiful. That is why offloading the conception to a machine, or a consultancy firm is contrary to its nature. But if you are making something for an extrinsic purpose, I see no reason in theory not to rely on these things.

All this is to say, I see clear metaphysical distinctions between what generative AI produces and ART. You surely can use an ai in making your art like you use a brush or computer But the picture it shats forth, however awesome, is not itself art. It is an asset or material to be used in art, quite possibly.