My point is that art comes from emotion, experience, and expression – not from arranging matter into a certain geometry. A photo of the Mona Lisa, taken by a human, can be art. A photo of the Mona Lisa, taken by an automated security system, can't be.

If the human made picture is evaluated by an AI, is it still art? If the security cam-picture is indistinguishable from the human-made, how could you evaluate it as non-art?

It doesn't matter whether you are able to distinguish human-made from computer-made "art". The distinction exists by definition, irrespective of whether you can actually tell the difference in practice. Just like many past events are now lost to time and will never be remembered, but that doesn't mean they didn't happen.

One possibly interesting sidenote are the fake Vermeers made by Han van Meegeren (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_van_Meegeren)

So accurate were these fakes - not copies, but new paintings in Vermeer's style - that several experts verified them as real, and then tried to sue to save their reputations.

These fakes were certainly made by a human, but are somewhat mechanical in the sense that they were copying someone else, much like an AI copy of existing artists.

The interesting thing here is that once van Meegeren was exposed he became famous in his own right and his 'fakes' became valuable, not as fakes, but as genuine Han van Meegeren originals.

Just to be clear. Your idea is that something is art when it was made by a human. And a perfect replication of it somehow loses the trait, and becomes non-art? This makes zero sense. This would make only the physical object itself the art, and it wouldn't matter what form it has?

Of course it makes sense - a print is different than an original, they have a different price, they have a different impact. Even when it is a very good print.

For that matter, a limited run print has a different impact and value than an unlimited run print. Compare an original warhol print of a can of soup, to a modern repr print, to an actual can of soup, to an I <3 NY t-shirt.

So digital art cannot exist?

Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson, July 1993 - https://imgur.com/a/JdHlOxm :

Calvin: "A painting. Moving. Spiritually enriching. Sublime. High art!"

Calvin: "The comic strip. Vapid. Juvenile. Commercial hack work. Low art."

Calvin: "A painting of a comic strip panel. Sophisticated irony. Philosophically challenging. High art."

Hobbes: "Suppose I draw a cartoon of a painting of a comic strip?"

Calvin: "Sophomoric. Intellectually sterile. Low art."

Ok, well AI art is also created by the human, in the same way that a photograph is taken by a human, but goes through the camera machine.

Why are you taking the photo of the Mona Lisa? If it's because you just want a nice picture of a famous painting, then no the photo is not art, but rather nice looking photograph of a piece of art. If however you are doing something transformative with the framing or compostion or context of the photograph and using the values imbued in the Mona Lisa to try to make some sort of artistic statement of your own, then yes that photo is art.

The creation of the Mona Lisa was art. The painting itself and photos of it are signifiers of the act.

This confuses a lot of people who think art is defined by finished, potentially consumable art objects.

Art is made by artistic actions - especially those that have a lasting impact on human culture because they effectively distill the essence of some feature of human self-awareness.

The result of the actions can sometimes be reproduced, collected, and consumed, but the art itself can't be.

This is where AI fails. It produces imitations of existing art objects from statistical data compression of their properties. The results are entertaining and sometimes strange, but they're also philosophically mediocre, with none of transformative power of good human-created art.

You are not being self-consistent. If art is defined by the creative process, not the end product, why are you measuring its quality by the transformative power of the end product?

I also don't think your (very strong) assertion that AI art products have no transformative power would stand up to any sort of unbiased, blinded comparison. Art's transformative power on the viewer comes from the effect of the art object (the end product) on a human mind, and it's possible to get that effect while knowing absolutely nothing about the source of the art object.

> If art is defined by the creative process, not the end product, why are you measuring its quality by the transformative power of the end product?

There is no end product. There are only consequences.