This is not as bad as some of your positions, Rakuen, but your arguments are in line with your general ethos of "whatever gets me more stuff is correct." I mean, whatever your individual argument for something is, you seem to come down on the side that advantages you every time. Your free speech arguments allow you to say anything without consequence, your cultural appropriation arguments allows you to take anything without consequence, which this argument does as well.
I'm not even saying your arguments are incorrect, individually. But, taken as a whole, they add up to meaning, at the very least, maybe you shouldn't be the one making them.
Also, kind of arguing a side point to your main thrust (but I would argue you're arguing a side point to the main problem I have with AI art), but Mary Lowd's argument that "Everyone gets to create." is just bad, because when you give people the ability to create "who don't have time to develop advanced art skills", they create bad art. Like, okay, you know there's a phrase in customer service, it's terrible, it goes "The customer is always right." Yeah, sure, to their faces. You smile and nod and let the idiot feel like they did something, and then you go back in the back and do the job correctly like you were trained to and they weren't.
And, have you ever worked in a kitchen? Like, seriously, how do people mess up ordering a simple sandwich or pizza so, so badly, again and again? There was a semi-viral article recently about modern day manners, and it advised that your hamburger should not be a salad. And you'd be surprised how often that's the norm. You don't like onions? Cool, neither do I. Add some jalapenos? Ooh, getting spicy, nice! And can I ... nope, three strikes, you're out. You've just been rude, but furthermore, probably whatever monstrosity you're on your way to committing won't even be very good. Okay, that kind of got off topic (obviously a sore spot for me) but also, like, people order literally dangerously all the time. Like, if the menu doesn't offer it, don't order your hamburger anything other than well done, because that means the cooks aren't trained to do anything but that, and they will kill you with undercooked meat.
The saddest story I've ever heard is my brother who puts in hard wood floors for a bunch of nouveau rich-off-oil types, and a guy ordered their most expensive wood floor, not knowing it was that expensive because a. it's actually poisonous, which means the people working on it have to take expensive precautions to make sure they and the customers aren't harmed by it, and b. the wood is actually beautifully multi-colored, with blues and greens, which makes it worth the extra expense for some people. So, the floor was installed like that, only to have the customer angrily complain that he didn't want any blue or green on his floor. So, the whole floor was redone, at even more expense, to make it all brown, but still this rare, poisonous wood, so this idiot could brag about how he got the most expensive wood when way cheaper stuff would have done the same thing without potentially poisoning him. He was paying extra for blue and green he didn't want because he didn't know what he was doing. He made a bad floor.
Of course, that's all perhaps a bit beside the point, and AI art probably won't potentially kill anyone (non-art AIs in general, I mean, I've seen enough sci-fi/horror to guess that's a possibility), and I don't really say you just plain can't make good art with it. But, when someone does finally use it in a decent way (and I've yet to see something much beyond the "huh, that's funny" level from AI at best), it's not going to be someone who, well, doesn't know what they're doing. The limitation of AI that makes it an art tool rather than an artist is that it ultimately can not make choices; to use your example, it can perhaps recognize a picture of a fox, it can create a picture of a fox that I can look at and say "yeah, that's a picture of a fox", and it can then create a second picture of a fox, but if I asked it which of the two pictures of the fox it made is better, it cannot decide. Art is subjective, sure, but at the end of the day, a person can pick out which picture of the same subject they like better, meaning, ultimately, creating "good" art with AI is more about "curation" than "creation". Basically, it is a matter of tastes, sure, but even tastes can and must be trained. I'm a movie critic; believe, I know.
Ultimately, Lowd has the argument backwards; instead training emotionless, tasteless machines to "create" art without all the effort that goes into it, wouldn't it be better to train machines to do the emotionless, tasteless jobs that take up all the time and energy real people need in order to develop advanced art skills? Like, I'm not as down on capitalism as much as furries, but that's some ultra-capitalist dystopia shit right there; machines that do all our leisure and recreation for us so we have more time to work jobs?
This is not as bad as some of your positions, Rakuen, but your arguments are in line with your general ethos of "whatever gets me more stuff is correct." I mean, whatever your individual argument for something is, you seem to come down on the side that advantages you every time. Your free speech arguments allow you to say anything without consequence, your cultural appropriation arguments allows you to take anything without consequence, which this argument does as well.
I'm not even saying your arguments are incorrect, individually. But, taken as a whole, they add up to meaning, at the very least, maybe you shouldn't be the one making them.
Also, kind of arguing a side point to your main thrust (but I would argue you're arguing a side point to the main problem I have with AI art), but Mary Lowd's argument that "Everyone gets to create." is just bad, because when you give people the ability to create "who don't have time to develop advanced art skills", they create bad art. Like, okay, you know there's a phrase in customer service, it's terrible, it goes "The customer is always right." Yeah, sure, to their faces. You smile and nod and let the idiot feel like they did something, and then you go back in the back and do the job correctly like you were trained to and they weren't.
And, have you ever worked in a kitchen? Like, seriously, how do people mess up ordering a simple sandwich or pizza so, so badly, again and again? There was a semi-viral article recently about modern day manners, and it advised that your hamburger should not be a salad. And you'd be surprised how often that's the norm. You don't like onions? Cool, neither do I. Add some jalapenos? Ooh, getting spicy, nice! And can I ... nope, three strikes, you're out. You've just been rude, but furthermore, probably whatever monstrosity you're on your way to committing won't even be very good. Okay, that kind of got off topic (obviously a sore spot for me) but also, like, people order literally dangerously all the time. Like, if the menu doesn't offer it, don't order your hamburger anything other than well done, because that means the cooks aren't trained to do anything but that, and they will kill you with undercooked meat.
The saddest story I've ever heard is my brother who puts in hard wood floors for a bunch of nouveau rich-off-oil types, and a guy ordered their most expensive wood floor, not knowing it was that expensive because a. it's actually poisonous, which means the people working on it have to take expensive precautions to make sure they and the customers aren't harmed by it, and b. the wood is actually beautifully multi-colored, with blues and greens, which makes it worth the extra expense for some people. So, the floor was installed like that, only to have the customer angrily complain that he didn't want any blue or green on his floor. So, the whole floor was redone, at even more expense, to make it all brown, but still this rare, poisonous wood, so this idiot could brag about how he got the most expensive wood when way cheaper stuff would have done the same thing without potentially poisoning him. He was paying extra for blue and green he didn't want because he didn't know what he was doing. He made a bad floor.
Of course, that's all perhaps a bit beside the point, and AI art probably won't potentially kill anyone (non-art AIs in general, I mean, I've seen enough sci-fi/horror to guess that's a possibility), and I don't really say you just plain can't make good art with it. But, when someone does finally use it in a decent way (and I've yet to see something much beyond the "huh, that's funny" level from AI at best), it's not going to be someone who, well, doesn't know what they're doing. The limitation of AI that makes it an art tool rather than an artist is that it ultimately can not make choices; to use your example, it can perhaps recognize a picture of a fox, it can create a picture of a fox that I can look at and say "yeah, that's a picture of a fox", and it can then create a second picture of a fox, but if I asked it which of the two pictures of the fox it made is better, it cannot decide. Art is subjective, sure, but at the end of the day, a person can pick out which picture of the same subject they like better, meaning, ultimately, creating "good" art with AI is more about "curation" than "creation". Basically, it is a matter of tastes, sure, but even tastes can and must be trained. I'm a movie critic; believe, I know.
Ultimately, Lowd has the argument backwards; instead training emotionless, tasteless machines to "create" art without all the effort that goes into it, wouldn't it be better to train machines to do the emotionless, tasteless jobs that take up all the time and energy real people need in order to develop advanced art skills? Like, I'm not as down on capitalism as much as furries, but that's some ultra-capitalist dystopia shit right there; machines that do all our leisure and recreation for us so we have more time to work jobs?