Heard a guy at a coffee shop say AI art is 'just math' and I nearly spit out my latte

I was sitting in a Starbucks in Denver last Friday, and some dude in a beret was arguing with his friend that AI art 'doesn't count' because it's just 'an algorithm crunching numbers.' Like, bro, my brain is just neurons firing, does that make my stick figures invalid? I get the ethics debate, but reducing it to math feels like missing the whole creative process on purpose. Anyone else run into people who act like only paintbrushes count as real art?

3 comments

3 Comments

piper_burns1mo ago

Oh man, have I been there? I once tried to argue that my macaroni art from kindergarten was "just glue and pasta" and my mom got legitimately mad. But seriously, the neuron thing is spot on - my brain's basically a slow, messy algorithm too, just with more coffee spills and existential dread. I remember doodling stick figures in class and the teacher said it was "creative expression" but now if an AI does it, it's "just math"? Makes me wonder what I've been doing with my life honestly.

king.derek1mo ago

Ngl I used to roll my eyes at AI art but that neuron thing actually made me rethink it.

jennys721mo ago

The neuron thing really does put it in perspective, doesn't it? I think we get so caught up in seeing AI as this magic box doing stuff on its own that we forget it's literally just learning from us, from all the art we've made and shared online. It's like how people freak out about their phones listening to them for ads, but we're the ones typing all our thoughts into search bars and swiping through photos all day. The AI is basically mimicking patterns we've already created, that's what surprised me the most when I looked into it. We train it on our own human messiness and then act shocked when it spits back something that looks familiar. It made me rethink a lot of things, not just art but how we judge anything new before we really understand the process behind it.