I just want to make funny Pictures.
That’s great! These things are super fun. Just don’t call yourself an artist or try to copyright your generations. That’s like pretending to be a musician because you’re good at Guitar Hero.
In fairness, I had a college buddy who learned to play real drums by playing a lot of Rock Band. He was no Joey Jordison, but he wasn’t half bad.
Aw, that’s cute, a drummer thinks he’s a musician too? (I kid, that’s a running joke in music circles, percussionists are definitely musicians, we’d be lost without them). That’s awesome! I suppose expert drumming in Rock Band would be a lot like the real thing. A program like rock band would probably work as a great drum trainer on a real set.
So did I, and I didn’t even know I could play until years later when I sat in front of a friend’s kit for a lesson with them. They basically talked me through the setup, gave me a song to play, and I just played the opening without much fuss. They told me I didn’t need the lesson, I could already play and I just needed time on the kit, left the room and let me go ham.
Honestly who cares about being an artist? There’s always going to be snobs trying to tear you down or devalue your efforts. No one questions whether video games are art or not now, but that took like twenty years since people began seriously pushing the subject. The same thing happened with synthesizers and samplers in the 1980s and as a result there are fewer working drummers today, but without these we would not have hip hop or house, and that would have been a huge cultural loss.
Generative art hasn’t found its Marley Marl or Frankie Knuckles yet, but they’re out there, and they’re going to do stuff that will blow our minds. They didn’t need to be artists to change the world.
Image generators don’t produce anything new, though. All they can do is iterate on previously sampled works which have been broken down into statistical arrays and then output based on the probability that best matches your prompt. They’re a fancier Gaussian Blur tool that can collage. To compare to your examples, they’re making songs that are nothing but samples from other music used without permission without a single original note in them, and companies are selling the tool for profit while the people using it are claiming that they wrote the music.
Also, people absolutely do still argue that video games aren’t art (and they’re stupid for it), and it takes tons of artists to make games. The first thing they teach you about 3d modeling is how to pick up a pencil and do life drawing and color theory.
The issue with generative AI isn’t the tech. Like your examples, the tech is just a tool. The issues are the wage theft and copyright violations of using other people’s work without permission and taking credit for their work as your own. You can’t remix a song and then claim it as your own original work because you remixed 5 songs into 1. And neither should a company be allowed to sell the sampler filled with music used without permission and make billions in profit doing so.
By the same logic, artists don’t produce anything new either.
All art is derivative. If an artist lived in a cave, they would not be able to draw a sunset.
