It is becoming increasingly silly to claim that AI-generated art is 100% derivative or even 100% plagiarized.

Of course, I don't expect anything I say to convince anyone. The fact that soon 99.99% of the media we are exposed to will be generated by AI will do that for me.

However, I find it fascinating that I immediately accepted AI art as equally creative and original as "traditional" art, whereas others see it as a sacred duty to deny the intelligence of machines. That is of course not a statement about AI art, but about how our view of the essence of humanity.

I think the difference is ontological: I see humans as neither dualistic nor materialistic, but in terms of idealistic objectivism: that is, we are an informational process embedded in a biological system. By contrast, dualism sees humans as a mind/body dichotomy, and materialism sees them as solely a physical process. Accordingly, from my perspective, any informational process that reproduces the same results from the same inputs can be said to engage in a conscious process. But at the same time, I see outcomes in terms of the entire history of a system. That is, for an AI to create a work, it was necessary for Leonardo da Vinci, Johannes Vermeer, and Claude Monet to produce their work so that an algorithm could process it into something new.

The disagreement is that I do not see any essential difference between a human and an algorithm performing that derivative process. I judge work on its own merits, not by the process that created it.