I don’t really see how a human curating an image generated by AI is fundamentally different from a photographer capturing an interesting scene. In both cases, the skill is in being able to identify an image that’s interesting in some way. I see AI as simply a tool that an artist can use to convey meaning to others. Whether the image is generated by AI or any other method, what ultimately matters is that it conveys something to the viewer. If a particular image evokes an emotion or an idea, then I don’t think it matters how it was produced. We also often don’t know what the artist was thinking when they created an image, and often end up projecting our own ideas onto it that may have nothing to do with the original meaning the artist intended.

I’d further argue that the fact that it is very easy to produce a high fidelity images with AI makes it that much more difficult to actually make something that’s genuinely interesting or appealing. When generative models first appeared, everybody was really impressed with being able to make good looking pictures from a prompt. Then people quickly got bored because all these images end up looking very generic. Now that the novelty is gone, it’s actually tricky to make an AI generated image that isn’t boring. It’s kind of a similar phenomenon that we saw happen with computer game graphics. Up to a certain point people were impressed by graphics becoming more realistic, but eventually it just stopped being important.