Art is clinically defined as a creative expression that can be visual, auditory, or linguistic and can be used to communicate ideas, emotions, or beauty. My definition of art includes a creative expression of the mind—the human mind. Sure, artificial intelligence can create a picture or an image of something, but I don’t believe it has the capability to create real, emotion-inducing art. Art requires people to use a creative process, often an experimental one that may take several attempts to get right—something AI does not do. AI uses prompts that are given to it in order to generate a result, so when you think about it, it is a human idea that influences the AI’s output. The difference, however, is that the person thinks of the prompt input, but it is not the person themselves creating the art, so there is truly no emotion behind it.
“That sense of interplay, or the ability to react in the moment, is something that artificial intelligence can’t reproduce,” says Liz Mineo, a staff writer for Harvard Gazette. Mineo’s statement, in simpler terms, means that AI cannot produce the emotion-inducing reaction that art created by humans can. I strongly believe this is the case because AI does not think like humans do. Humans share the same makeup—a brain, a heart, and a unique personality—while AI has only a code that interprets the prompt it is given. Human creativity is something that AI lacks, which also means that AI lacks the comprehension of human emotion, making it difficult for any art created by AI to evoke a genuine emotional response. It should also be understood that images or any other creations produced by AI are not original, but rather a collection of preexisting images used to satisfy the prompt. This is because AI cannot generate new ideas without being given input.