Ship of Theseus but AI art
(Note: Setting aside the debate on AI ethics, assume for a moment we are strictly discussing human creative input and authorship. And imagine we live in world were AI is ethical for sake of doing a specific debate)
Pure Manual: An artist draws, paints, and renders every single mark by hand.
Micro-Assistance: The artist creates the entire piece by hand, but uses generative fill for a single, minor background correction (e.g., erasing a stray line or filling a tiny texture gap).
Partial Inpainting: The artist draws and renders the main subject by hand, but uses AI inpainting to generate secondary background elements (e.g., foliage or sky).
Guided Rendering: The artist draws the original line art and layout by hand, but uses image-to-image AI to render the colors, lighting, and shading.
Sketch-to-Image: The artist provides a rough layout sketch, and AI renders the entire final artwork based on that composition.
Pure Text Generation: A user enters a text prompt and the AI generates the complete image without any hand-drawn input.
Consider everything in between the numbers as well.
[The Question]:
For those who view AI assistance as invalidating a work as "art":
Where along this step-by-step progression does the threshold lie?
If Step 2 is still art or “artist made it”, what specific principle separates Step 2 from Steps 3 or 4?
(Do not the dodge question with “there are no true scotsman” argument)
Tl;dr “at how much creative control in the output is the artist the artist of the output/ or output is art?”
(Note: Ai assisted writing/structuring for sake of readers, idea is mine)
Consider a upvote if you found this post thought provoking or downvote if it feels unproductive, you don't have to agree with my stance at all i try to practice agree to disagree.