From Human Hands to Random Seeds: Where is the Human in Art?

In recent years, we have witnessed a massive change in how creative work is produced. Things that we thought only humans could do are now done by Artificial Intelligence. Especially in the visual world, with the development of Stable Diffusion models, we see this clearly. Even Google’s latest Nano Banana Pro can create works with incredible reality. When we look at the results, it looks exactly like work touched by a human hand. But this situation brings a big question to our minds: What makes Art, art? Or, what is it that makes us look at something and call it art?

In this blog, I want to explore why we hesitate to accept AI as an artist, even when the result is perfect. Even though we cannot separate human art from AI art with our eyes, saying “this is art” for an AI image feels difficult. But why? Is the human the ingredient that makes art?

The Role of Randomness

Let’s look at the example of a painting. When a human draws a picture, they start with a specific goal (this goal does not need to make sense or deliberate), but they develop it through certain randomness—like mistakes or the random thoughts in their own head, the random vision they have in their perspectives at that time. The funny thing is, AI produces the image in very similar the same way. It starts with a specific random seed, does random samplings, and creates the piece with its learned parameters. So, is art defined by the randomness in the development process? I think we can eliminate this option, because both human and machine do this.

The Human Touch

So here is another question: Do we view it as art just because these randomnesses passed through a human hand? This sounds like a very absurd example but imagine that a random guy pushed the painter and magically the brush painted an amazing paint with its own. Can we call this an art? Maybe. But maybe the missing part is something else.

Lived Experience

Maybe it is “lived experience” flowing through artist’s hands? When we see a piece of art, perhaps we are looking for the life, thoughts, and emotions behind it, not just the pixels or the fact that it is produced by human hand and brain. Think about the most famous paintings in history. We love them not just because they look nice, but because we know the painter was sad, or in love, or angry when they painted it.

An AI has no childhood, no bad days, and no happy memories. It has data. Can data replace the feeling of a lived life? When an AI paints a crying woman, it knows the shape of a tear, but it does not know the feeling of sadness.

Looking Forward

As we move forward in this new era, the definition of creativity is becoming blurry. We are trying to find the human place in a world where machines can dream like us. Maybe the answer is not in how the image is made, but why it is made. But for now, we are still looking for the answer.