Some ad hominem here; and a bunch of goalpost shifting. I’m not claiming to be an artist. Are you, by the way?

If you look through civitai and the stable diffusion subreddit you’ll find people who’ve spent thousands of hours tuning these AI tools to produce something that they imagined. In my mind, they’re artists. It might be bad art, some of it is, some of it is arguably not, but they fit the description to me. They certainly think of themselves as struggling to create things they envisioned, and sometimes achieving it.

As to who gets to define art and what art is: please understand that I’m saying —>> you are gatekeeping <<— by calling people who spend thousands of hours creating imagery they want to create “not part of the artistic community”.

So, I have a broader view of the artistic community than you, full stop. It includes people whose livelihood is going to be disrupted by this technology. It includes a bunch of people who couldn’t create imagery they imagined before but can now.

Just as I can understand why Luddites burned shit in Northern England, I can understand and even respect a fight from interest groups to turn back the clock on new technology. And I am interested to see how strong guilds like SAG navigate and negotiate new economies around creating.

End of the day - I think moralizing in order to limit human creativity with bullshit made up rules about what an artist “is” or should be is foolish, wrong-headed, and ultimately doomed as an endeavor, plus it runs the risk of convincing new creatives not to engage. It’s a net loss for human creative output, while advocates get to pearl-clutch about the evils of tech. It’s just the wrong, wrong, wrong attitude to have about it; probably a waste of time trying to convince one well-spoken person on HN to change their views. But, hopefully you will. You could still rail against the tech by the way, or advocate for protectionism or a bunch of stuff, even if you decided to accept a person could use a diffusion model to make something creative.