[hgsgm]

What is "scratch"?

"Great artists steal".

Art is defined by remixing the life experience of the author.

ChatGPT's ability to create art is only limited by it's input (text corpus) while humans have images, sound, smell, touch, etc.

[beepbooptheory]

Each day I walk through my war torn and impoverished little village, looking for food and water. I keep in my pocket a small postcard of a beautiful tropical beach I've never been to. When I get home, I use the bits of supplies I've found to make my little paintings or write my little stories.

The GPT version of me can only remix the world I am already in, so this version mostly paints dark landscapes and violent imagery, however much I prompt myself to draw something pretty, it always comes out looking a little macabre.

The regular old person me, on the other side, is plagued by the human afflictions of desire and fantasy. This version of me can only paint the beach on my postcard, but because of my desperation, focus, and need, these paintings become larger and more fantastical than I thought I could imagine, but in that, they provide me and my loved ones comfort and escape and novelty.

The human version of me makes statistically improbable things, but, to me, is still a plausible human, and the one I'd rather be at least.

All just to say, maybe there is a more qualitative difference here than you think.

[overspeed]

People draw an arbitrary line of difference in the way we treat AI programs and human outputs.

A human imagining orcs and one horned horses has 'fantastical, larger than life' imagination but AI generation drawing people with strange hands is 'incorrect'.

These are not one to one examples but the point stands that with enough suspension of belief, people are more likely to take on human creations at face value than AI when they know the source.

[beepbooptheory]

Sure I think I agree. My point is just you can imagine the post-apocalyptic artist with a human brain painting the beach or just painting the dark landscapes; but we can only imagine the GPT brain painting the dark landscapes, in so far as that is majority of its day to day dataset, thus the statistically likely output.

This suggests a qualitative difference between the two when it comes to "creating" or "generating" that feels far from trivial, even if you want to say the AI can make "good" things, whatever that means to you.