Anyone can take a photo, sure but making art via photography is incredibly complex.

I think that's exactly the point. Anyone can use AI, but that doesn't make then all artists. But there is a place for AI in art, like many other tools. Same as for other tools, jusy knowing how to use them doesn't make you an artist. Just look at all the bad Photoshop stuff everywhere. Does that mean that using Photoshop makes you a talentless hack? Or just that a lot of hacks use it to pretend they're artists? Same for AI.

Wut? Are you serious? You’re just going to boil down an entire artform to that? That’s an unbelievably reductive opinion.

This statement can also accurately describe those who say ai art isn't art.

Wut? Are you serious? You're just going to boil down an entire artform to that? That's an unbelievably reductive opinion.

That's kind of the point, isn't it? People might spend a lot of time learning the different AI tools, how to supplement them with post processing and manual edits, how to combine them and how to nudge them in the direction they want, and then spend countless evenings trying to get the result they want. And people are going to say "they just AI generated it, they are not artists", just like people might say photographers are not artists, they just take a photo.

But we know it's far from "just" taking a photo or "just" generating it with AI. Sure, you can "just" do both, but the result will be far from real art without all the preparation and extra work.

But it's easy to take a random shitty AI image to laught at, just like it's easy to take a random shitty photo.