No, I get it. And I still disagree.

There's no gradient here - if Dylan had come on stage and done a lick with a Fender the Newport Folk Festival would still have been outraged. It's binary - you either use the new tool or you don't, and if you use the new tool, a lot of the people whose worldview is built around the old tools are going to lose their minds.

Content Aware Fill came out 12 1/2 years ago in April 2010. It's true that you don't use it by saying "siri, erase the telephone poles" but that's the UI, not the process. Fundamentally it's all Markov chains and the Markov chains in CAF have less training data. It's no less AI.

"Digital art" was clearly added to appease all the painters and pencil artists who hated anything that had been inside a computer. There's a dividing line there - is it paint on canvas? Charcoal on paper? then it isn't digital. ...for now.

Here's the thing, though - people paint manually because it's fun. People paint with robots because it's fun. "my fun is different than your fun" is pretty much what the state fair is about so it's pretty obvious to me that a pen plotter with an oil palate is "digital art" and I'll bet it's obvious to everyone else. When it comes to money? I mean, I know illustrators with wikipedia pages and six figure quotes and they were all trained in the classics, work half in Photoshop. When it comes down to professionals it comes down to efficiencies. When it comes down to amateurs it comes down to pissing on other amateurs.

If you need to whip out a matte for a Netflix cartoon that will be seen for six seconds, AI gonna relieve a lot of suffering. If you need something that will stand up to scrutiny, there will always need to be a human tweaking it. The only thing that will change will be the level of scrutiny.

One of my favorite digital artists can't hold a paintbrush because of health issues. But he shares his tools, shares his process, and posts prolifically. He also has a Twitter interface on one of his (self-coded) generators.

As far as I'm concerned, AI provides tools for people who wouldn't be able to use tools normally. That improves everything. Saying "I made this without computers" is great, but it also prompts the question "why?"

I learned drafting on paper with pencils. I still have my Staedtler Mars set, I still have my bitchin' compass, I still have lead holders. But I much prefer "show me the clearance around this pulley."

"show me the clearance around this pulley" has the added advantage of being able to go "now render it in PETG I'll be back for it Thursday."

I had a friend who adored blueprints. But they had to be BLUE. They had to be made using ferric ammonium, they had to fade in sunlight, they had to give you a headache if you shared a room with them for too long, they had to make you wash your hands if you held them for more than a few seconds at a time. Actually all that is a lie. He liked blueprints that looked like blueprints but were actually made on an inkjet printer because he was a fucking idiot who didn't know any better. When I gave him an actual cyanotype he recoiled in horror and remained chagrined for years afterwards. But then, he's an amateur. I'm a professional.

It's usually amateurs and critics who insist they know what art is and you don't. You're fucking with their fun because they've defined themselves based on a fragile definition. I think if you look at the broad scope of history, every time we come up with a new tool, things advance. Not linearly? Not always at first? But once society has integrated that tool, society has improved.