[marssaxman]

> No, we've opened up the ability for someone who writes a short textual description of an illustration to obtain an illustration ostensibly matching that description

Yes, that is the new art form which has been invented and opened up to a wider audience. By analogy, some people used to complain that DJs were not real musicians, because they just play records made by other people. While technically true, this observation is not interesting, because selecting and mixing records to create a larger sonic flow is its own art form.

[caconym_]

I have no problem saying that a prompt to an AI system and subsequent iteration on that prompt, model parameters, etc. can be a form of artistic expression. However, the distinction between this form of artistic expression and the form practiced by the artist whose works the model was trained on is substantive and has important moral and legal implications, so when it is conspicuously absent from these discussions I do indeed find it "interesting" enough to make explicit.