Calling AI-generated images art is a stretch. Same thing with creative writing. It can make some low-cost illustrations and writing, but it is very far from decent art. Compare those results with their amazing coding or math capabilities.
Those are either copies or bad. I think the difference in quality and originality is huge, even if they can create plausible looking images in already invented styles.
And yet, they're good enough to fool most people, which is what you're trying for if you're aiming to automate the production of art. The fact that we got there more than 2 years ago, before agentic coding was even barely useful, should give you an idea of where things are going.
This seems like a non-sequitur. The entire point of AI is that it's able to generalize and perform at or above human level. Let me know the next time your camera is able to simulate conceptualizing something.
Or is your argument that AI is permanently doomed to not work?
It obviously does not follow since it precedes AI in "automating ... art" by 150 years.
What happened to art since?
We got artistic photography on top of paintings as well. It did not become widespread right away as people were mostly enamored by the simplicity of getting a realistic image first. But after that died away, people made art out of photography too.
Yes, those who did landscapes or portraits for hire were affected financially, but we ended up with more art, not less.
If I need to spell it out: genAI for image generation will also become an avenue for real artistic expression, as some pioneers are demonstrating, even if image generation is democratized, there will be a difference between art and non-art. It will also not kill conventional art either.
If I need to spell it out for you: no artistic 'tool' has yet attempted to automate the thought that goes into art. Would you consider someone an artist if all they did was hire someone off fiverr?
Sure it has: automatic exposition and focus, HDR image blending... These used to require more thought and are now done for you. You still sometime override it, and an artist more often than a non-artist.
A tool is let to make a set of choices, but there is some control: you can prompt an AI to draw a white animal, a white bird or white swan — if you get a white horse with wings and a beak on any of the latter ones, we could say that AI is putting more thought, but at the moment, it wouldn't and we'd call it broken.
This future still sucks. The tech industry is making the world a worse place.