Unpopular opinion: AI is just a new medium of art.

It's like the advent of photography after painting. It was dismissed as an art form for a long time:

- https://antique-photography.com/when-was-photography-conside...

- https://medium.com/@aaronhertzmann/how-photography-became-an... (from 2018!)

Similarly, right now AI art is widely dismissed as "just prompts." But having tried many times to generate images via prompts, it's very hard to get what's in my head to show up in the result. I ended up spending much more time editing the images than creating them... but, I could do that with much simpler tools, without learning advanced tools like Photoshop.

In a couple of instances though, the AI has blown me away by generating something that better captured what I wanted to convey! I suspect the trick is in beng very detailed in where I was coming from and the emotions I wanted to engender.

I predict appreciation of AI art will shift to overall imagination, taste, and appreciation of technical nuances noticeable only to those "skilled in the art", such as prompting techniques and the quirks of the model used. I even suspect there will be genres of AI art using weaker models (kind of like photographs with Polaroid cameras.)