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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 3, 2022

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I think the deeper question is a feeling about how much the AI is actually creating art, and how much of it is just "it got trained on a zillion images and it's just cutting and pasting according to your prompts; you tell it you want a buxom blonde woman in a bikini sitting on a beach and it selects out of all the stored images of buxom blonde women, beaches, and bikinis and trims it as you refine your prompt".

If this is the deeper question, then it seems to come from just a fundamental misunderstanding of how AI art works. There's no cutting or pasting going on. Not unless you want to say that a human artist who develops his own personal style through observing pre-existing pieces of art and experimenting with what he can draw is just "cutting and pasting" from the images saved in his head from those observations.