Setting aside the usual arguments on the anti- and pro-AI art debate and the nature of creativity itself, perhaps the negative reaction that the Redditor encountered is part of a sea change in opinion among many people that think corporate AI platforms are exploitive and extractive in nature because their datasets rely on copyrighted material without the original artists’ permission. And that’s without getting into AI’s negative drag on the environment.
Ah, very interesting that you want to focus on photography as a comparison. To me, this just infers that you are not familiar with the type of choices that photographers do make, creatively. Just because they have endless amounts of subject matter readily available at their disposal, does not make the process any easier or different than other types of art.
Photographers still consider composition, lighting, area of focus, color, etc. Along with a large amount of other factors such as camera body, filmback, lens, fstop, iso, flash, supplemental lighting, post-processing, the list goes on.
Again, all of these choices are actively made when creating the work - using one’s critical thinking, decision making, experience and knowledge to inform each choice and how it will affect the outcome.
Generative AI is not that and will never be that, no matter how much you argue otherwise. You are entering a prompt, the model is interpreting that and generating a result that it calculates to be most statistically accurate. Your choice of words are not artistic choices, they are at most, requests or instructions. If you iterate, you are not in control of what changes. You only find out what has changed after the result has been generated.
Again, you are totally missing the point to the Fountain and using it as a false equivalence. It was made as a critique of the art world, to show the absurdity of what art critics said was valid art at the time. Whereas today, generative AI is not being made as a critique to anything. It’s being made for profit, to replaced skilled labor and using the work of the same people it’s trying to replace. Hopefully you can see how the two are different.
You do know many of those things are considered in AI generated images as well, right?
And there is so much more to it than a simple text prompt, even something as basic as what nodes i feed into what else and in what order/ weight can have vast impacts, do i want to use a depth map based on a 3d mannequin I’ve rigged up in blender to use as my pose or go with a canny line filter to keep the form as the focus, should i overlay the image cutout layer before filling in the background and running a detailer node on top or merge them together and see how that goes, etc.