Yeah, but that’s not really your sole source of inspiration. My son has been ‘inspired’ by the art of all other kids in his kindergarden. Certainly by the time he gets to the age where he does it professionally he’s been inspired by an uncountable number of people.

What % is his independent inspiration? 30%? 90%? There are certainly people for whom it was 90%. For most we don’t know.

We do know one thing for sure - that for AI it’s 0%

We don't know what percentage is independent inspiration for a person using the AI to create art.

Once upon a time it was a contentious idea that humans had significant authorship in photographs, which merely mechanically captured the world. What % is the camera's independent inspiration?

Here, we have humans guiding what's often a quite involved process of synthesis of past human (and machine) creation.

> We don't know what percentage is independent inspiration for a person using the AI to create art

The person using the AI doesn't matter in the equation. They aren't an artist, they're a monkey with a typewriter.

We're talking about the AI here, because it can generate the same images no matter which monkey with a typewriter is typing the prompts.

> The person using the AI doesn't matter in the equation. They aren't an artist, they're a monkey with a typewriter.

That's an opinion.

Does your opinion hold in all circumstances? If I spend 20 hours with an AI, iterating prompts, erasing portions of output and asking it to repaint and blend, and combining scenes-- did I do anything creative?

Of course the person using the AI matters. It's literally the same as holding a brush. You can give it a prompt, get a result and be unhappy with it, modify it or remove it, and proceed doing that until you are happy with what you have.

No matter how great the AI is, a monkey with an AI will never generate anything useful.

Being inspired isn't against the law. copying is. it'd be one thing if this conversation could be had with useful terminology that's actually on point. instead we have you, insisting that there is no creative process, there is only experiencing other art and inevitably copying (because apparently you think that's the only thing humans can do!). It's all so telling. Yet its tragic because so many here don't even realize it. I'm sad for your inability to engage with creativity and creative acts.

I think a lot of the discussion is where the balance of the creativity lies when a human uses a model (trained on other artistic works) to create art.

Is the result a copy, or perhaps a derivative work of the art in the training set?

Does the person using the model have authorship of the result?

Was it even okay to use the art to train the model and then share the resulting weights?

Are the resultant weights protected by copyright themselves?

I suspect the actual answers we'll come to on these topics will be full of nuance.

> When a little child draws a tree for the first time, where do they draw inspiration? Do you think they were reviewing works of Picasso?

Are we going to discount the hundreds to thousands of artistic pictures children are exposed to? Or how about the teacher sitting up front demonstrating to the class how to draw a tree?

> Do you not have eyes, ears, do you not perceive and get inspiration from the natural world around you?

Learning to see as an artist is a distinct skill. Being able to take the super compressed simplified world view that mind sees and put something recognizable on paper is a specialized skill that has to be developed. That skill is developed by doing it over and over again, often by copying the style of an artist that someone enjoys.

Or to put it another way, go to any period in history prior to the mid 20th century and art in a given region starts to share the same style, dramatically so, because people were inspired by each other, almost to a comical extent. (Financial reasons also had something to do with it as well of course, Artists paint/carve/engrave/etc what sells!)