this post was submitted on 08 Nov 2025
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Yes, that's the idea.
Anyone can now transmit ideas through your eyeballs, and that's awesome.
They could also put in effort, and use the tool to finish a sketch they drew, or combine a render and a photograph, or simply rearrange and overwrite generated parts until it looks like what they imagined. How much labor can go into a text that communicates an idea, and still not be art?
At what point does a definition exclude Koyaanisqatsi?
Exactly. I'm not usually one to appeal to etymology for the "true meaning" of a word (the etymological fallacy is a thing), but in this case I think it's relevant to bring up. Art is from the Latin ars which means skill, craft and handiwork, among other things. To me, art isn't just a something that's nice to look at or even something that causes an emotional reaction of some sort. A natural landscape can be beautiful, but it's not art. To make something art, the human touch is exactly what's needed. Time, passion, effort and skill go into art. People talk about how generative AI lets anyone make art... but everyone can already make art.
It's certainly true that not everyone has the means to afford all the artistic tools they would like, but people have been making art for tens, if not hundreds of thousands of years with what they had access to. And I don't mean crude stick men, but sophisticated art which shows an understanding of animal anatomy and artistic techniques for producing effects of motion in a still image. If you actually want to make art and are willing to put in the effort, you can make great things with very little. Especially for people who pay for generative AI, there is really no excuse if you're using it to make "art". The image might look good, but it doesn't have any value if it's just another AI generated image among millions of others. Whatever restraints are "stopping" people from making their own art, I don't see how entering a prompt and letting a machine construct an image comes anywhere close to fulfilling someone's creative passion.
If I paint a landscape by hand, and generate one flower, does it stop being art?
The craft of Koyaanisqatsi was editing. People have recreated it using stock footage, as a complicated joke, and frankly the message still works. The whole original movie is an arrangement of uncoordinated b-roll. There are no actors. There is no dialog. Any individual part is almost meaningless, but the gestalt is an award-winning cultural touchstone.