Why AI-Generated Images Aren’t Real Art 
DALL-E makes pretty pictures. But calling it “art” is like calling a rock with two holes a sculpture.
Art by Alexander Naughton
“It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” — Macbeth
The Consciousness Question
Japan has a museum of rocks that look like faces. Not carved. Just… rocks. Wind and rain accidentally made them face-shaped. Everyone laughs because obviously these aren’t sculptures. No one intended them. No consciousness behind them.
AI art = same thing. Pretty outputs. Zero consciousness. Zero intention. Just statistical pattern matching that accidentally looks good.
Why this matters:
Art = communication between conscious beings → AI has no consciousness → no intention → no meaning → just expensive pareidolia
The argument:
✓ Real art communicates something (artist to viewer)
✓ AI art communicates nothing (no one home inside the machine)
✓ Valuing AI outputs as “art” = losing what makes art special
✓ Worst case: culture becomes photocopies of photocopies until nothing means anything
The Rock Museum Analogy
Pareidolia — Seeing Faces That Aren't There
In Japan: Museum collects rocks that happen to look like faces.
Two holes + line = human brain sees face. Rocks “smile” and “frown” and “squint.”
But the rocks aren’t smiling. No one carved them. Wind, rain, geology accidentally made face-shapes.
The joke: Everyone knows these aren’t art. Category error to treat rock-faces like sculptures.
Chinsekikan museum (“hall of curious rocks”)
Key difference: Sculptor = conscious. Wind/rain/geology = not conscious.
No consciousness → no intentionality → no meaning.
AI art = rock faces. Looks like art. Isn’t art. Just pattern-matching that accidentally outputs pretty things.
DALL-E Is Actually Impressive (Let’s Be Honest)
The Tech Is Legitimately Good
DALL-E 2 can do wild stuff. Not denying the talent here.
Artists are scared for good reason:
“DALL-E is breaking my heart. AI art is about to lay utter waste to traditional visual art forms. This will be so much more destructive than what the Internet did to music.” — Tweet thread
Understanding ambiguity:
Prompt: “a robot hand drawing”
Output: Both “robot’s hand drawing” AND “hand drawing a robot”
Cultural knowledge:
Asked for Gollum → doesn’t just copy movie posters → draws what an illustrator might imagine from reading The Hobbit
“Gollum writes his autobiography” — Source tweet
Naturalistic beauty:
“illustration of a dreamy field of camellias under a blue sky with fluffy white clouds” — Source
The thing never saw flowers. Never tasted rain. Yet outputs this.
It’s impressive. Legitimately Earth-shifting technology.
Best Case vs Worst Case Scenarios
Best Case: AI as Tool (Like Better Paintbrush)
Current limitations:
→ Trouble with multiple characters in frame
→ Can’t count
→ Difficulty placing objects inside other objects
→ Messes up fine details (hands, water splashes)
→ Breaks physics sometimes
DALL-E can’t understand “a woman whose eyes are full of stars”
If limitations persist: AI remains tool. Human artists guide the process. Consciousness still required. Good outcome.
Worst Case: AI Replaces Artists Entirely
Already happening: Many AI outputs need zero human input after the prompt.
How easy prompting is:
Prompt: “a painting by Grant Wood of a robot head with flowers growing out of the top”
Result:
Without artist name:
“A cyberpunk style illustration of a happy robot head with flowers growing out of the top with a rainbow in the background, digital art”
Result:
One-sentence prompt. Done.
Calling yourself “the artist” for typing this = like commissioning a painting then calling yourself the painter because you paid for it.
Worst case world: Most “art” you see online generated by non-conscious machines with minimal human input. Behind civilization’s entire aesthetic = vast emptiness communicating nothing.
Photograph of hurricane doesn’t get anything wet. AI art doesn’t communicate anything.
What Art Actually Is (Philosophy Speed Run)
Art = Communication Between Conscious Beings
30,000-year-old hand painting in Chauvet Cave:
Chauvet Cave handprint
Not just image. Communication: “I was here.”
Aristotle (via Will Durant):
Artistic creation springs from the formative impulse and craving for emotional expression… the aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.
John Berger (Landscapes):
By looking at [art], we are looking through an artist’s eyes… We are looking at a looking.
Tolstoy (What is Art?):
Art is a human activity… one person consciously conveys to others feelings he has experienced, and other people are affected by these feelings and live them over in themselves.
The pattern: Art = consciousness experiencing something → expressing it → another consciousness receiving it.
AI art breaks this: No consciousness experiencing anything. No feelings to convey. No “living over” happens.
Dialog becomes lecture. Communication becomes decoration.
'But If It Looks Good, It's Art!' — Why This Is Wrong
The deflation argument: “If an image strikes someone as art, then it’s art.”
Why this fails: Reduces “art” to “beautiful.” Makes the word meaningless.
Examples that aren’t art despite being beautiful:
→ Natural vistas (mountains, sunsets)
→ Hurricanes
→ Flowers
→ Rocks shaped like faces
We find these affecting. We may weep at their beauty. But calling them “art” implies cosmic consciousness, purpose, intentionality.
Without intentionality: “Art” is bled of all meaning. It can’t differentiate anything. The word dies.
Walter Benjamin (The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction):
Even perfect reproductions lack the “aura” of originals. Even if you can’t tell an original da Vinci from a forgery side-by-side, one has meaning the other lacks.
AI art = forgery not of specific artworks, but of meaning itself.
The Future: Counterfeit Culture
What Happens When AI Floods the Market
The Marvel movie score problem:
Famous scores (Star Wars, Jurassic Park, Harry Potter) = instantly memorable.
Marvel scores? Can’t hum a single one.
Why: Directors use “temp music” (scores from other movies) during editing. Get attached to it. Tell composers: “Make it sound like this.”
Result: Lukewarm mediocrity. Music scored to different movie’s music.
AI art = imitating the temp. Forever.
Trained on all art equally. Nothing picked out as special. Learning without point-of-view.
Tolstoy on imitation:
To produce counterfeits [of art], definite rules or recipes exist… the talented man, having assimilated them, may produce such works cold drawn, without any feeling.
Only returning to original conscious experience renews art. Copying what came before = counterfeit.
Art schools in Tolstoy’s time taught students to copy masters. Spread counterfeit art everywhere.
AI does this at scale. Industrial counterfeit art production.
The Grossman-Stiglitz Paradox for Culture
In finance: If markets are efficient, buy index funds. But if everyone buys index funds, who picks winners/losers? How can markets stay efficient?
In culture: If AI art is cheaper, it drives out human artists. But then where does training data come from?
Answer: From other AI artists.
Normally training AI on its own outputs = “leakage” (bad practice).
But if AI drives out human artists, leakage becomes unavoidable.
The death spiral:
AI trained on AI trained on AI → counterfeits of counterfeits of counterfeits → grainy photocopy of culture → nothing means anything anymore.
You were born in a world where most things were made by human consciousness.
You may die in a world where nothing is made by human consciousness.
AI art summoned at wave of hand. Expressing no emotionality. Transmitting nothing. Overwhelming surplus of counterfeit art.
Corporations photocopying culture until it’s unrecognizable.
The Hope
Maybe AI stays limited. Maybe it’s just a better paintbrush. Maybe human consciousness remains necessary for real art.
I hope so.
But if replacement happens, we lose something irreplaceable: art as communication between conscious beings. The special place of consciousness in creating beauty.
Art without consciousness = rocks with faces. Pretty, but meaningless. 
Source: The Intrinsic Perspective - AI-art isn’t art
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