Calling pieces where an artist used an "AI" to do things like touchups "AI art" is like calling a piece where somebody used the magic wand tool "Magic Wand art." Because that's what the magic wand is - an algorithm written to identify similar elements and isolate them. That's essentially the beginning steps of an LLM. "AI" has been used in this regard for decades now, it's only that AI has become a buzz word for companies looking to replace worker skills with a cheap fascimile so that they don't have to pay their workers that has led to the concept of "AI art," by which it can be safely assumed is referring to generated images.

And I believe the word that OP was looking for is intent. As Adam Savage put it, AI art lacks intent. Whether a piece is good or bad doesn't matter, you can feel what the artist had in their head and what they wanted to express with a piece, and that's what he cares about when looking at a piece of art. When a 6 year old draws a dog, it doesn't matter whether that dog is a stick figure or a work comparable to the Mona Lisa - you know that they wanted to express that they like dogs. AI has no intent. It simply combines pieces of its data set, transforming art created with intent into a pile of different details that no longer have their original context.

[–] PeriodicallyPedantic@lemmy.ca 1 points 3 months ago

I disagree that you can feel the intent in the painting of a 6yo more than you can feel the intent behind the prompt in an AI generated image. The person making the prompt has intent.

If the intent of a painting was evident, then there wouldn't be so much backlash against abstract art, and debate about what art means.

All I was trying to say is that "AI assistance" has become a sliding scale all the way from simple tools like intelligent select tools, to complete image generation, and all kinds of points in between (eg: smart-erase, uncrop, in painting to add entirely new things) so it's difficult to draw a clear line between what is and what isn't "AI art"