Just went to an AI art gallery in Portland and walked out confused

I visited this gallery downtown last weekend that was ALL AI generated paintings. Beautiful colors and wild compositions for sure. But the thing that bugged me is every piece had a little plaque with the prompt like "photorealistic woman in a sunset" or whatever. No artist name. No process. Just a prompt and the software name. I get that it's the machine making the image but someone still had to curate those prompts and pick which ones to frame and hang. To me that's still creative work even if you didn't touch a brush. Everyone I talked to there acted like it was soulless and lazy but I kinda see it more like directing a photo shoot. You're still making choices about what looks good. Has anyone else seen this kind of exhibit and felt torn about it?

3 comments

3 Comments

piper_burns2mo ago

Question whether the prompt and the final choice really count as "creating" or if it's just really advanced shopping. You picked the prompt from a list in your head, the machine did the heavy lifting, and you just said "that one" at the end. Isn't that closer to commissioning a piece than actually making it? The real artist is the person who trained the model on millions of stolen paintings, not the person typing a sentence. It feels like we're giving credit for the idea but ignoring the actual craft that went into every brushstroke of those training images. What's the line between being a curator and being an artist when the only physical effort is clicking print?

oliver22mo ago

I read that some people compare AI art to being a film director rather than a painter, which kind of fits your point about commissioning.

joelwells14d agoProlific Poster

Read a piece the other day comparing it to using a recipe app versus actually learning to cook. You pick the ingredients and hit start, but the machine does all the work you used to need years of practice to do well. The person who wrote the recipe's code and tested it is way more of a cook than you are. Same with prompting. You're not mastering brushwork or color theory or composition, you're just picking a few words and seeing what pops out. Calling it art because you chose the prompt feels like calling yourself a painter because you picked a paint color at Home Depot. The real craft is in the training and the data, not in the typing.