If an AI-art falls in a forest...

The title is misleading. It's not AI art falling in the forest. It's human-made art.

Here is the question I pose:

If you see a piece of art, and you do not know who created it, is it any different from AI-generated art?

Or, put a different way: Is AI-generated art just as valuable as human-made art if you don't know what human made the art?

A couple assumptions are necessary:

1. It is impossible to find out who made the human art
2. The general AI-art that we are imagining would be, from a purely visual standpoint, as good as, if not indistinguishable from, the general human-made art we are imagining.

Normally, I would say that AI art has less value than human art because there was a human behind the human art. Someone actually worked on making it^[1].

But if you don't know who that human was, is there really value to the art?

Well, sure. My instinct says that art from an anonymous artist still has value.

But what if you really don't know whether the art was human-made or AI-made? Then you may start shaking with this moral quandry. You want to appreciate the art, but you don't know if you are "allowed" to.

So now there are two variants to this question:

1. If you don't know what human made art, is it any more valuable than AI art?
2. If you don't know whether a human or AI made the art, how are you supposed to feel about appreciating it?

I may have to think more about that second question.

Mainly, I wanted to drop a line from a blog post I just read, which reminded me that I wanted to discuss this topic:

It's that art was never just "output" to me. The point was never just the image. It was my hands, my bad decisions, my (what felt like) infinite number of discarded versions sometimes, my taste built over years of looking at things and being influenced and rebelling against influences. When a model spits out an image, it's skipped all of that.
...
For art, and for me, process is the point, quite possibly the entire point. The meaning comes from a human having something to say and figuring out how to say it.

So, to me, this is part of the answer to question #1. If you know that a human made it, but you don't know who that person was, you can still be assured that that person went through a process to create the art; they made decisions; they crafted something based on their accumulated experience and taste.

Also regarding: "The meaning comes from a human having something to say and figuring out how to say it" -- Most of my art is just me copying reference images that I think look cool or pretty. I'm usually not imbuing a particular meaning into it. Does that mean my art is no more valuable than AI? I don't think so, because I still put process into it. I decided how exactly to sketch and color it. And there is of course something inherently rewarding about me personally recalling the memory of having created it - as insertchaos said, I would never want to replace that with just the output. It's not the same. (But -- to an outside observer (someone who didn't make the art), it could feel the same...)

Here's an example of this train of thought I just encountered. I was reading a friend's blog post and, while contemplating the nature of comments on a blog, I checked what one other person had "hearted" his post, which led me to the below blog.

https://substack.com/@dreamsymbols/p-203837052

Though I don't explore the blog any deeper, I feel a little bit of excitement because of my interest in dreams, and especially when I figure that the art here is (maybe?) based on this person's dreams^[2].

Then a thought crossed my mind: "Wait a second, is this art AI-generated?".

My instinct was no, but these days, you have to consider.

It doesn't really look AI-generated to me, but it can be really hard to tell, and I haven't exactly been intensely training my brain to distinguish AI-art from non-AI-art.

Then I asked myself: "But does it even matter?".

So we get to the variant of the question I pose in this post, in the form of: "If you don't know whether a piece of art is AI-generated or not, is it still valuable?". And I kind of have a feeling that this really just comes down to: "If it is probably AI-generated, is it still valuable?"

Here's my gut answer in this case. I say yes, it is still valuable. The art here is meant to represent the dream that the person is describing. So what if they prompted AI until it spat out an image that looked really close to what they saw or experienced in a dream? There is inherent value here in the mental image itself, regardless of how it manifested into a sharable medium. The person had an idea of what they want the end result to look like -- the idea itself is an act of creation^[3]. Even if a person used AI, they are still making decisions about what tweaks to make (via prompting) and they decide when it is complete and matches their vision. Those decisions are creative decisions.

At the same time, if this is real, hand-drawn art, then I obviously commend it, and I think it is really cool to have the skill to draw something from your mind and for it to look really good. And, despite what I just said about there being decision-making even in AI-art, there is so much more decision-making with hand-drawn art. Every placement of a line, every curve, every shade, every aspect of where objects are placed in the composition and how much detail to put into each thing - those are all creative decisions that stack up into the creation.

But if I don't know whether those "decisions" were made by a human or an AI... well, what am I to think? I can only interpret it based on the aesthetics of it. This is an example, a case in point, not a resolution of the question... I still feel an off-ness here. I feel myself not wanting to commit to appreciating this art because I am unsure of its origin. Aesthetics versus process. I easily can appreciate the aesthetics of it. If it were human-made, I would appreciate the process of it being created. But I waver on that point due to the possibility that the process could have been drastically different to what I normally imagine it would have been, in the case that it was AI-made. Now that I say this, I realize that any digital image^[4] of art can be questioned in this way.