I’ll take a stab at it. Art (to me), is something created by someone that is intended to communicate at an emotional level.

While there are examples of things that meet that criteria that clearly aren’t art, I think almost all creations that are intended to be considered art by their creator meet that criteria.

Right or wrong I’ll stick with that for now and revise it in time. But with that, the question then is, Can AI create art?

Can AI create something with that intention of communicating at an emotional level?

So first, can AI create anything to begin with. I’ll just assume yes to keep the thought progressing. Next is whether AI can have intention.

Well, a computer virus has the clear intention of malicious acts. So computers or computer code can be said act with intent. I’m not particularly happy with that perspective but I can’t ignore precedent.

So that leaves whether a computer can intend to communicate at an emotional level. Clearly they can. A program can be executed that has the intention of eliciting an emotional response from a person.

So where does that leave us with my definition of, “Art (to me), is something created by someone that is intended to communicate at an emotional level.”

I have almost boxed myself into a corner here but there’s one out left and I’m going to take it. A computer isn’t “someone”. It’s “something”. Which means we need to review the classic agreement that computers aren’t people, no matter how clever they evolve to be. Neither is anything else in the universe. The only thing in the entire universe that is “someone” is a person.

If that changes in the future then I’ll need to review my definition. But for now, it stands. A computer can’t create art because, regardless of how complex its intentions are, how creative it’s output is, and how it makes us feel, it isn’t human and therefore what it creates isn’t art.

It’s something else. I don’t know what it is. But I (as of now) don’t consider it art. I don’t consider paintings created by dogs or monkeys art either. I don’t consider sunsets, or supernova, or the Fibonacci sequence art either.

Perhaps there needs to be a new word to describe the output of AI so that we preserve the meaning of art.

Or we need a better definition. But if we think we need a better definition, then we’re implicitly doing so to make a distinction between human and AI output and therefore don’t actually need to complete the exercise as we’ve already decided there’s a distinction we wish to make.

Getting back to your point. We need a way to define art in order to distinguish a difference between human and AI generated art.

But I think logically that’s no longer necessary. The need itself means we implicitly agree that there’s a difference. The rest is semantics.