“What makes this AI different is that it’s explicitly trained on current working artists. This thing wants our jobs, its actively anti-artist.”

Tweeted RJ Palmer, a digital artist, quoted in "An A.I.-Generated Picture Won an Art Prize. Artists Aren’t Happy. 'I won, and I didn’t break any rules,' the artwork’s creator says" (NYT).

Who cares about art contests? And really, who cares about the security of the careers of artists? What really matters is the quality of the viewers' experience. 

And yet, the viewers' experience may be degraded if we know this just came out of a computer. Maybe we'll look at fantastically great images but we won't care, because there's no human consciousness behind it. That's similar to the question whether we will enjoy having sex enclosed in a virtual reality sex-sarcophagus.

Also, there's the question of time. The computer works fast and — depending on the technique and the scale of their images — artists take a long time. If you want something human-made, you'll have to pay more. But maybe you don't want something human-made that much.

My big question is why isn't art a whole lot better? Why aren't we seeing great things every day? It's hard to bemoan the loss of human art when we had already diverted nearly all of our attention to photographic images.

 ALL Credit of this post going to https://althouse.blogspot.com