Art is the human need to make things for its own sake, and the way in which the things we make reflect us.

Art is when you doodle into the margins of your notebook, art is when you tap a beat on your steering wheel, art is when you sing in the shower, art is when you fold your napkin or straw wrapper into a little origami shape, art is when you're holding something malleable and you make little sculptures or forms out it just because you want to. Art is the voice in the back of your head that tells you to embellish the furniture youre making. That makes you wanna build sandcastles. That made cavemen paint on cave walls, and that tells young scouts to whittle little faces into sticks. Art is what tells furries to draw characters. What tells you to start that webcomic. Write that story. Art is what makes you daydream about what you might create, and the things you make because you dayreamed of them.

Art is both the product of that facet of the human experience, and the experience of needing to make things. Some people make art to commicate. Some people make art to soothe themselves. Some to process their thoughts. Some to connect with those around them. Some to express their emotions and experience and get them out of their head and into the world in some way. But everyone who makes art does so because some part of their experience as a human calls to them to be creative. To make stuff.

Gen ai does not produce art, it produces visuals and sounds and words that are statistically probable outputs given a particular prompt and its data set. It has no vantage point, no personal taste dictating what it enjoys or doesnt. Dictating what it connects with or is repulsed by. It lacks fundamentally the experience necessary for it to be art. Artificial general intelligence may be capable of art, but genai just makes images. It doesn't make art.

(And those images are made from a dataset of art plundered from actual human beings whose attribution was washed away by the machine that uses their work. The function of ai is to wash the human origins off of creative works, in much the same way that money laundering washes money of its criminal origins. Which is why artist despise genai, and resent that people call what it produces "art". Artists see that as an insult to a facet of the human experience they hold very dear.)