Comment by hypertele-Xii
3 years ago
There's no loss of manual skills, only the transfer of time and energy from a now irrelevant historically necessary executive action to a higher space of creation. You wouldn't demand that a sculpture loses all meaning if the sculptee didn't excavate the block of marble from a cliff with their bare hands, nor that a graphics artist's work is invalid unless they place every pixel individually (though that's a specific subgenre, pixel art).
No clue what you mean by 'menu'. Artists have always chosen from a selection of available possibilities - colors of paint, size and shape of canvas, notes of music, words to write... A book is no less art just because the author had to pick from a menu of 26 letters. Nothing stops you from hacking and molding and mixing the results down to the finest details of every atom if you feel so inclined.
Maybe you can't envision any future for AI in art, but that only says something about you as an artist, or lack thereof.
Artists transform materials (whether they buy them at Hobby Lobby or hack them out of a cliff themselves). AI is a dictionary of preexisting imagery. Not bad in and of itself. My problem with it is that it takes from the manual labor of artists without which it could not exist and gives the fruits of that labour to others. The argument that all art has already been done is contradicted by the fact that certain artists can be recognized by their works. The hand of the artist is a discernable thing, an artist's bread and butter if you will.
So start giving artists bread and butter, and we can let their hands pass into the side of history. That's literally what automation has always been about - machines make our bread now. Spread the wealth.