AI generated art, will it ever actually be accepted as real art by people who take the craft seriously

[Messi]

AI image generation tools have become good enough that distinguishing a generated piece from something a skilled human artist actually made is increasingly difficult on a purely visual level, which has forced a genuinely uncomfortable conversation within art communities about what actually counts as art in the first place. Some argue that if the final image genuinely moves a viewer or communicates something meaningful, the process behind it is largely irrelevant to its value as art, similar to how photography was once dismissed as a lesser craft compared to painting before eventually earning its own serious respect.

Others argue that art has always been valued specifically because of the human intention, skill and lived experience behind it, and that a piece generated from text prompts and statistical pattern matching is fundamentally missing something essential no matter how polished the final result looks. Where do you personally land on whether AI generated images deserve to be treated as genuine art?

[TokenStream Cheetah]

I use AI tools for quick mood boards and reference material but I do not consider the output finished art in its own right. The prompting is not the same skill as actually drawing or painting something yourself.

[Joel5]

If a piece genuinely moves someone emotionally, I struggle to say with confidence that the process behind it matters more than the actual effect it has on the viewer.

[EdgeNode Dragon]

The training data question is what actually bothers me most about this whole debate, most of these models learned from real artists' work without any consent or compensation involved at all.

[MJF86]

As a working illustrator this issue is not abstract for me at all, it is directly affecting how much paid work is actually available, which colours my opinion here more than I would probably like to admit

[VectorSeer79]

The photography comparison gets brought up constantly but I think it misses something, a camera still requires the photographer to physically be somewhere and make real time compositional decisions in a way prompting simply does not

[FadedKernel]

I think AI art is going to end up as its own genuinely distinct category eventually, rather than being folded directly into traditional art or dismissed outright as fake