It reminds me of pop articles about the P=NP question which simplify it down to, "is being able to recognize creativity the same as being creative?" Turns out for practical purposes, yes (the simplification question not the mathematical question), as long as you can offload the work to an AI on a powerful compute cluster!

I bet I could give a phrase to a collection of art students in some university and DALL-E, and the human art would likely be more creative than a single run of DALL-E. What distinguishes the humans is that you can tell them to make art of their own choosing and they will, but DALL-E is unlikely to create anything interesting with no input.

Van Gogh invented Starry Night without any prompting despite it not being a real scene (much less anything he had ever seen and such abstraction was very rare in the 1880s). Picasso made Les Demoiselles d’Avignon in 1907; it was so radical even his fellow artists were unable to comprehend it.

It doesn't change the fact that DALL-E is pretty amazing tech, but it's still as far behind human ability as any AI is today. It is way way better than what came before, but that's true of most technologies.

It's amazing and wonderful, but it's not the AI that's "creating art", it's the human choosing the best AI output that's doing the artistic part (often togehter with the person who input the prompt to the AI).

It's just like Dada poets did 100 years ago: you use a mechanical process to generate quasi-random output, and then you choose some of this output to present to other humans. The way you provide input to the mechanical process (e.g. what words you choose to put in the hat) and the curation are the real creative part of the art, not the mechanical process generating the text itself.