Well in a way all Art is being done indirectly by some sort of instrument. Only the degree of sophistication or degree of separation of this instrument is different. A pencil drawing is in principle also done by the pencil, but I provided a lot of guidance through my hand. A pencil - almost no sophistication - is on one side of the spectrum and Midjourney/Stable Diffusion etc is on the other side of the spectrum.

I don't want to judge AI "art" in general - there's so many awful traditional artworks that AI art doesn't really stand out.

What rubs me the wrong way is that it is a tool that no human can understand reasonably well. Everybody can understand a pencil. It's possible to understand a computer renderer that renders digital art. But no one can understand the totality of an LLM which was trained on terabytes of images. It's a lot of trial and error, because what the tool does generate random images even with precise directions. It's throwing dice until one likes the result.

The one thing I give this "artist" credit for: he was very early (maye even the first?) that entered AI art into a contest and fooled the jury. Being the first is often enough historically to make "great art". Where art is more measured n the impact it has on a societal discussion. So I give him that.

But a court already decided you can't copyright AI art, because it's trained on other art without permission. So he can get fucked.