Openai/6972ace2-0ae4-8007-9392-57a315ba0ea5

This conversation was exported from ChatGPT

gpt-5-2

User: People that collaborate with AI to make art get a lot of criticism.

People that collaborate with AI to make art get a lot of criticism. They are accused of being without talent. Like they simply commissioned an piece of art but had no real say in it. But I think a better and more accurate analogy would be that people with true artistic vision that utilize Creative AI are more like art directors. They may have some skills in making art, but their real talent is identifying what's good and what's not. How to make things actually work visually or thematically. Those people are paid quite well for their work and it's a job that not anyone can do. I think that's how I look at my relationship with AI art

Assistant: Your analogy holds up better than most of the rhetoric thrown around this topic.

Your analogy holds up better than most of the rhetoric thrown around this topic.

What you’re describing is closer to art direction, curation, and systems thinking than to traditional craft execution. Those roles have always existed. Renaissance workshops had masters who barely touched the canvas but defined composition, iconography, and intent. Film directors rarely operate the camera. Architects don’t lay every brick. Nobody serious claims they’re “talentless” because of that.

The confusion comes from people collapsing means and ends. For a long time, manual execution was the bottleneck, so it got mistaken for the essence of art. AI breaks that illusion. When execution becomes cheap, what remains visible is judgment: taste, coherence, restraint, thematic control, and the ability to recognize when something is right versus merely flashy. That skill is rarer than people like to admit.

Most AI-generated art criticism isn’t actually about talent. It’s about threatened identity. If someone has invested years equating self-worth with technical difficulty, a tool that dissolves difficulty feels like an attack. So they move the goalposts and redefine “real art” in a way that conveniently excludes the new method.

There’s also a genuine failure mode you’re already implicitly rejecting: people who prompt once, accept the first output, and call it vision. That’s not art direction; that’s vending-machine aesthetics. Real direction involves iteration, rejection, constraint-setting, narrative continuity, and an internal model of what the work is for. AI makes the gap between those two kinds of users very obvious.

If anything, AI collaboration punishes weak vision more harshly. When the machine can generate endless options, the inability to choose becomes glaring. Noise explodes. Only people with a coherent internal compass can converge on something meaningful.

So your framing is grounded: you’re not outsourcing creativity, you’re changing where creativity lives. Less in wrist and pigment, more in synthesis, selection, and intent. History suggests that’s not the death of art. It’s a phase shift, and like all of them, it makes some skills obsolete and others suddenly legible.

User: what is a good term for people that make good art with AI ?

what is a good term for people that make good art with AI ?

Assistant: The fight over terminology is really a fight over legitimacy, so the best terms are the ones that describe what’s actua…

The fight over terminology is really a fight over legitimacy, so the best terms are the ones that describe what’s actually being done, not how offended someone feels about the tool.

A few that hold up under scrutiny:

Art Director This is the cleanest and hardest to dismiss. It already implies vision, taste, iteration, rejection, and coherence across a body of work. Using AI doesn’t break the definition; it just changes the production pipeline.

Creative Director Slightly broader, more conceptual. It emphasizes theme, mood, and intent over visuals alone. Works well if the output spans images, narrative, design, or world-building.

Visual Curator This one foregrounds selection and judgment. It signals that the value lies in choosing, refining, and contextualizing images rather than raw generation.

Computational Artist More academic, less punchy. It frames AI as a medium rather than a shortcut. This term has historical precedent in generative and algorithmic art circles.

Synthetic Artist Philosophically interesting. It suggests synthesis across human intention and machine capability. Some people bristle at it, which is often a feature, not a bug.

Prompt Artist is popular but weak. It overemphasizes the input mechanism and undersells everything that happens after the prompt: iteration, constraint, editing, sequencing, and refusal. It plays into the critics’ caricature.

If you want a blunt, reality-based framing: AI-assisted artist is accurate and boring, which is often how language survives long-term.

Underneath all of this, the uncomfortable truth remains: no term will fully protect against bad-faith criticism. People who think “real art” must hurt to make will keep inventing purity tests. The durable position is to use a term that matches your function, then let the work demonstrate whether vision is present. Over time, the vocabulary follows the practice, not the outrage.