I literally agree with you. AI is not real art, but I still enjoy the creative minds of people who use it. As long as people understand that even if AI art is not real art, you can appreciate the creative mind behind them.

Ai will never replace anyone or anything.

Pretty much all the imagery generated by AI, gives me the vibe a lot of things in the 80's gave me when I was a child. There have been a few exceptions, things that made me go, wow, that does look like real art. And it'll often look like the work of a young, energetic art student that's going places someday, but the thing is, it'll be a fluke. Good luck recreating that success, as there's no true RNG, even in AI, as any good chatbot will tell you. But that same chatbot will tell you, you may as well think of it as RNG because it's too hard to predict, and the models are all but incapable of doing whole bodies, even when they can get hands and feet right. Why? I could tell you the reason, but really, you should ask an AI, or several, and see the differences (but also, far more similarities) in its outputs - and try thinking of them as "outputs" more than "responses" sometimes.

So why do I compare these outputs to the 80's? Because one of our favorite words back then was "tacky." It was our go-to word for the decade itself. Because that's what most stuff looked like, and we knew it, and so much AI generated imagery has that "off the assembly line and instantly dated" look, too round, too blandly or too wildly colored, too smooth, everything often "rounded cube/rectangle style." Like playing a video game where you see repeating assets everywhere, if they managed to have a modicum of diversity within the saminess. Like a casino where all the slot machines look different (I especially notice this with things like slot machines, typewriters, toasters, etc) yet walking past a long row of them still feels eerily similar to seeing a row of copy-pasted slots in New Vegas.

All that being said, I think AI itself is as much an art as a science. Code is art. The art of what? Of making electrical signals tap-dance on and off so fast and in such a perfect rhythm, that they equal near-perfect analogue signals (actual sawtooths and Sine waves, same as a guitar amp or synthesizer!) that, for example, become Michael Jackson's voice and Moonwalk, when those signals are fast and strong enough. Yet it only takes an old Yamaha chip, I assume 16-bits worth, plus the equally powerful (or not!) GPU and CPU to run a version of MJ's music and Moonwalk good enough for him to put his stamp of approval on! How much electricity does it take to run that system? Barely any compared to today's, right? And for 2Mb (that's megabits, not megabytes.)

What's the difference between the real MJ and the Sega MJ? RAM limit, ROM size, a very, very long virtual equivalent of an old punched-card in an old behemoth of a computer, and a final output from that which amounts to a Sine wave you could even project onto one of the old monitors. I wasn't able to fully appreciate this very site, for example, until I started dabbling in AI, because it didn't hit me how whether it's HTML, VBulletin code, Javascript, Python in the future perhaps, the people who worked on it originally were doing a version of what I was doing with my old HTML and Flash based sites - trying to make them something they're not originally designed for, by manipulating circuits.

"Of course it can be done!" Even if it clearly can't in the end, I can't hate that attitude anymore, at least not when it comes to art or tech. So much of the code we rely on, literally draws these boxes and renders these buttons and even the fonts themselves. And we want to say it's not in any way art? That its creators aren't artists? We artists barely know how half our tools even work and owe a lot more folks a lot more credit and respect than we give them. I'm glad I stopped being a stick in the mud and started seeing why AI's creators all wanting us using it so badly. It's for the same reasons the originators of a lot of the old things online - they want to make money, eventually, yes, but this is a real labor of love to somebody out there, not unlike NeoCities.

There's a lot of the old web lurking within AI, is what I'm saying, and its knowledge! I don't and never did understand those who proudly choose to remain ignorant.

Agree 100%