Someone sends me an email asking me to create a tropical painting. I create the tropical painting (acrylic on canvas board) and I ship it to the requestor. That requestor then uploads my creation and sells it as prints. Is that requestor an artist? I think not. He or she is a thief. This is AI Art in a nutshell. Well, maybe not as cut and dry. And the main problem is that a huge portion of our society is still unaware as to how this AI art is created. Someone sits down at their computer or with their Smartphone and types in a prompt that directs AI in creating an image. There is no skill or talent in this. It’s no more difficult than someone pushing the copy button on their printer. This image is created by AI consolidating segments of images (data it was trained with) that were originally created by real artists (and other watered down AI imagery) to make one new digital asset. The only positive thing about AI is that a visionary, activist, humanitarian, etc who is not an artist but has a profound message they want to get out to the world can use AI to generate an illustration that would easily get that message out. This would be OK if this person would also note that they did not create the art. I think it would be easy to create a system that uses blockchain to record and give credit to all artists whose art was used to create one AI image and this needs to be done. (Update 2/23/25 There are now platforms out there, such as Adobe Creative Suite, that are now implementing such processes! Praise God!) There are also now platforms like Nightshade that artists can use to protect their works, going forward, from being included in AI training databases.