Art is notoriously hard to define, and so are the differences between good art and bad art. But let me offer a generalization: art is something that results from making a lot of choices. This might be easiest to explain if we use fiction writing as an example. When you are writing fiction, you are—consciously or unconsciously—making a choice about almost every word you type

What's also important to note is how those choices are made in our mind. In the process of the decision-making, what we bring to it is our self - our past experiences, desires, and biases, and intention. They determine the next word we're going to say. So in essence, there's the input, there's the output, and in between is a nebulous, complex processing that's happening inside our brains, which is what arguably brings meaning and value to work, and by delegating creative work to AI, that's the part that we're outsourcing.

If an A.I. generates a ten-thousand-word story based on your prompt, it has to fill in for all of the choices that you are not making.

We can imagine a text-to-image generator that, over the course of many sessions, lets you enter tens of thousands of words into its text box to enable extremely fine-grained control over the image you’re producing; this would be something analogous to Photoshop with a purely textual interface. I’d say that a person could use such a program and still deserve to be called an artist.

OpenAI probably isn’t trying to build a product to serve users like Miller, because a product that requires a user to work for months to create an image isn’t appealing to a wide audience. The company wants to offer a product that generates images with little effort.

But this seems like a short-sighted view of the landscape. OpenAI might not want to build such a tool, but the whole industry is too nascent to develop a tool for any niche of a population that is creative, and persistent enough to use it with such effort and put much time into it to produce a single body of work. That's not to say that in a few years there won't be such niche tools for high-performers.

It’s harder to imagine a program that, over many sessions, helps you write a good novel. This hypothetical writing program might require you to enter a hundred thousand words of prompts in order for it to generate an entirely different hundred thousand words that make up the novel you’re envisioning. It’s not clear to me what such a program would look like. Theoretically, if such a program existed, the user could perhaps deserve to be called the author. But, again, I don’t think companies like OpenAI want to create versions of ChatGPT that require just as much effort from users as writing a novel from scratch. The selling point of generative A.I. is that these programs generate vastly more than you put into them, and that is precisely what prevents them from being effective tools for artists.

This also, like the previous point, seems short-sighted. One value, or a side effect, of tools and technologies is the democratization of abilities. The rise of streaming platforms, and the accessibility and availability of film-making tools have brought down the barrier to produce movies, bring your vision to life with a cinema, and so the number of movies that are being made have gone up significantly. But it's not to say that every movie made and released only in streaming platforms are worthless. There's some very original content there, made by people who had the vision but not the financial means to produce a movie before. In the future, there'll undeniably be a tool that's made for people who want to put as much effort into an AI tool to bring their vision to life. But that's what separates them from the rest - the effort, vision and persistence. It means then that the rise of LLMs, or other similar technologies of the future will certainly make many more artists, and through them, art. What it doesn't mean though is that everybody who uses such a tool can't be deemed an artist, or their work, art.