There's nothing creative in having someone or something else doing the work for you.
"Creating" with an AI is like an executive "inventing" the work actually done by their team of researchers. A team owner "winning" a game played by the their team.
That being said, AI output is very useful for brainstorming and exploring a creative space. The problem is when the brainstorming material is used for production.
The first two paragraphs of your argument could be used to discuss whether Photography (Camera is doing most of the work) or Digital Drawing (Photoshop is doing most of the work) are art.
Both things which were dismissed as not art at first but are widely accepted as an art medium nowadays.
I see this comparison to a camera a lot but I don't think it works (not that you're saying this, I'm just contributing). I'm not an expert but to me the camera is doing very little of the work involved in taking an artistic picture. The photographer chooses which camera to use to get a certain effect, which lenses, the framing, etc. All the camera is doing recording the output of what the person is specifying.
I think there's a sliding scale in both cases. Vanilla prompting something like DALL-E 3 and uncritically accepting what it spits out is the AI equivalent of dime-a-dozen smartphone snapshots of the Eiffel Tower or an ocean sunset. But like your description of professional photography, there are more intricate AI approaches where an expert user can carefully select a model, a fine-tune/LORA, adjust the temperature or seed, inpaint or layer different elements, and of course have the artistic vision to describe something interesting in the first place.
Photography mostly eliminated the once-indispensable portrait artist, among other formerly-dependable lines of work.
There's a line to be drawn somewhere between artist and craftsperson. Creating beautiful things to a brief has always been a teachable skill, and now we're teaching it to machines. And, we've long sought to mass-produce beautiful things anyway. Think textiles, pottery, printmaking, architectural adornments.
Can AI replace an artist? Or is it just a new tool that can be used, as photography was, for either efficiency _or_ novel artistic expression?
> until the day it starts teaching artistry to its users.
It almost definitely can start teaching artistry to its users, and the same people who are mad in this thread will be mad that it's taking away jobs from art instructors.
The central problem is the same and it's what Marshall Brain predicted: If AI ushers in a world without scarcity of labor of all kinds, we're going to have to find a fundamentally new paradigm to allocate resources in a reasonably fair way because otherwise the world will just be like 6 billionaire tech executives, Donald Trump, and 8 billion impoverished unemployed paupers.
And no, "just stop doing AI" isn't an option, any more than "stop having nuclear weapons exist" was. Either we solve the problems, or a less scrupulous actor will be the only ones with the powerful AI, and they'll deploy it against us.
The first two paragraphs of your argument could be used to discuss whether Photography (Camera is doing most of the work) or Digital Drawing (Photoshop is doing most of the work) are art.
The work a camera does is capturing the image in front of the photographer. "Art" in the context of photography is the choice of what in the image should be in focus, the angle of the shot, the lighting. The camera just captures that; it doesn't create anything that isn't already there. So, not even remotely the same thing as AI Gen.
The work of Krita/Inkscape/etc (and technically even Photoshop) is to convert the artistic strokes into a digital version of how those strokes would appear if painted on a real medium using a real tool. It doesn't create anything that the artist isn't deliberately creating. So, not even remotely the same thing as AI Gen.
AI Gen, as demonstrated in the linked page and in the tool comparison, is doing all of the work of generating the image. The only work a human does is to select which of the generated images they like the best, which is not a creative act.
In your example, the "come up with your own story" part is the creative part. But you're not "directing" the AI to generate it for you. You're just giving it a command. You're selecting from the results it outputs, but you're not controlling the output.
A film director is a creative. Ultimately, they are in charge of "visualizing" a screenplay": the setting, the the design of the set or the utilization of real locations, the staging of the actors within a scene, the "direction" of the actors (i.e., how they should act out dialog or a scene, lighting, the cinematography, the use of stunts, staging shots to accommodate the use of VFX, the editing (meaning, the actual footage that comprises the movie).
There's an old show on HBO, Project Greenlight, that demonstrates what a director does. They give 2 directors the same screenplay and budget and they make competing movies. The competing movies are always completely different...even though they scripts are the same. (In the most extreme example from one of the later seasons, one of the movies was a teen grossout comedy, and the competing movie was some sort of adult melodrama.)
So 1. being able to bring your own story come to life automatically is cool in itself, and would result in a lot of creative media that is not possible now. Do you know how many people have their own stories, plays, etc that are dying to find someone rich enough to get them published?
2. Using AI can be can be an iterative process. Generate this scene, make this look like that, make it brighter colors, remove this, add this, etc. That's all carefully crafting the output. Now generate this second scene, make the transition this way, etc. I don't see how that's at all different from a director giving their commands to workers, except now you actually have more creative control (given AI gets good enough)
1. We already have that now, it's called Word. Most people are just too lazy to write out their story. AI doesn't improve the situation, it makes it worse. It will become vastly harder to find the good stuff in the avalanche of crap.
2. Current AI can't do what you're describing, so the biggest difference is that you're posing a hypothetical against the real world. But more specifically: the director already has a specific vision in their hand; the purpose of the "direction" is to bring this vision into reality within the scope of their budget and resources. With AI, you have a general idea and the AI creates its own vision and you pick what you like the best, until you ultimately realize the AI isn't going to get what you actually want and you settle for the best the AI can do for you. So, completely different.
>But you're not "directing" the AI to generate it for you. You're just giving it a command.
That's what direction is though. Film directors prompt their actors and choose the results they like best (among many other commands to many other groups)
>You're selecting from the results it outputs, but you're not controlling the output.
The prompt controls the output (and I bet you'd have more control over the AI than you'd have over a drunk Marlon Brando)
Not even if you are directing and refining it? What if i smudge out sections repeatedly and over the course of say 20 iterations produce a unique image that matches closely what i am imagining, and that has not be seem before?
Buñuel would disagree with you: "The peak of film-making will be reached when you are able to take a pill, switch off the lights, sit facing a blank wall and project on it, directly from your eyes, the film that passes through your head."
"Creating" with an AI is like an executive "inventing" the work actually done by their team of researchers. A team owner "winning" a game played by the their team.
That being said, AI output is very useful for brainstorming and exploring a creative space. The problem is when the brainstorming material is used for production.