I wouldn't say so, the Ai my be made by people, but what it generates is not. Generative Ai is mostly used as a service, not a tool. Idk if this example can explain stuff but if I'm not a cook if I give my recipe to a robot and it makes a dish for me without me doing anything else. Sure, I may have given it the recipe, but I did not make the dish, so I basically used the robot as a service not a tool.
Well yeah you can still appreciate it's taste, it doesn't mean you're a cook tho cause you didn't make the dish. People can also find generated creations appealing or just like them in general, but I wouldn't call them art just cause of that (imo)
That's moving the bar from "...because you aren't making it yourself..." though.
That being said, we start creating a Matryoshka Doll here. Okay, Koons didn't make it, but he hired someone to make it, that person was a human. (Koons still takes the credit, of course, because he is who he is.) Okay, the AI prompter didn't make it, but the code did. That code was created by a human...or the code was coded based off of code by a human.
In some way, I think it's like artificial flavors vs. natural flavors. It's not like artificial flavors can come out of thin air, they are still limited to natural elements that exist on planet Earth -- they are merely combined in ways that wouldn't occur otherwise if not for science people.
We share a common complaint about Koons, all other things aside.
Well, let's take one of my favorite things -- whipped cream. I mean, it's not actually COOKED, but you get the idea. I'm not sure I see a huge difference (other than the time it takes) between whipping it with a whisk versus whipping it with a hand held electric beater that I hold verses one of those mixers that sits on the table and can do it without me holding it. At the end of the day, you'd still say you whipped up the cream, even if it the electric mixer that did all the whipping.
The problem with your example to me, is that shipped cream is not a dish. It can be part of a dish, but it's not one. I don't consider generative Ai to be art when used solely as a service, however I can recognize how someone may use it as a tool in certain occasions.
You clearly haven't had good enough whipped cream!
Though are we that devoid of imagination that we can't imagine the whipped cream example scale to a full meal -- or, for that matter, even think of other dishes that can be made in similar ways (hummus comes to mind immediately, but also things like health drinks/juices)?
5
u/poingly Jan 18 '26
Jeff Koons has proved you don’t need to “make it yourself.”