14
My friend Deb told me AI art is cheating and now I am not so sure
Deb has been painting for 30 years, and she told me last month that using Midjourney for concept art is just typing, not creating. I agreed with her at first, but then I spent 17 hours last week tweaking prompts and composing a piece about a flooded library in Boston. The final image feels more like mine than anything I have made with a brush in years. Do you think the effort we put into selecting and refining counts as art, or is Deb right that the machine is doing all the real work?
2 comments
Log in to join the discussion
Log In2 Comments
faithjones5d ago
Used to side with Deb honestly. Like I thought AI stuff was just lazy typing until my friend spent 18 hours on a prompt for a cyberpunk diner scene. He kept redoing the lighting and the reflection in the windows, changing small words and seeing how it shifted the whole mood. That's not just hitting a button. It's way closer to directing a photoshoot or being a film director. The machine is the brush, not the painter. So yeah, your 17 hours on the flooded library sounds like real creating to me, way more than Deb might realize.
5
Honestly though, 17 hours of tweaking prompts still means a machine is doing the actual brushwork. Deb's point about typing vs creating has some weight - if you can't draw it with your own hands, are you really the artist or just the client giving feedback?
5