Here are my thoughts on art and AI. Sorry for the length:

Making art is about making choices. Do I use this brush or that? Is my character outgoing or withdrawn? Is this passage played loudly or softly, fast or slow? At every step of the creative process choices are made that determine the final outcome. Many of these choices are made subconsciously and are just what feels right in the moment. But many choices are deliberate and are determined by trying different methods or different tools and deciding which best suits the artist’s intent. And it is this ability to choose one path over another that distinguishes art created by humans from “art” made by machines.
A machine’s distinguishing feature compared to humans is speed. Machines can sort through masses of information exponentially faster than people. Tell a machine what to do and it will do it immediately. A machine can “write” a book or “paint” a picture in minutes, something that would take a human weeks or months of concentrated effort to achieve.
What a machine can’t do is tell itself that what it has done is wrong or could be done better. It can’t tell itself that it would be better to make this passage of music mezzoforte instead of forte. Or that it would be more effective to use third person instead of first person narration. It can’t decide to leave that grammar mistake alone because it contributes to the lyricism of the piece. A machine cannot decide that what it is making is going nowhere and the best course of action is to save the best bits and start all over again.
As artists we understand that creativity is more than the product of our efforts and cannot be separated from our efforts, from the process of creation. The choices we make as artists define our art. What we are seeing with machine-made art is a form of cultural appropriation as offensive as that experienced by aboriginal and First Nations people who watched their culture and creativity stolen to enrich others with no connection to their history and lived experience.
We cannot let machine-made art become the norm in society. We must insist that art is a human activity, choosing authenticity over artifice. We can take lessons from the struggles of our aboriginal brothers and sisters who recognized that if they didn’t do something their cultures would be lost forever.
The choice is ours. It is what we do every day.