I would say yeah, art is about human connection, though also heavily about politics and culture. I’d venture to say that notions of separating art from those heavy hitters, politics and culture (which are arguably not even separate things in the first place, but I digress…), is largely a liberal capitalism thing and as unrealistic as most things about capitalism. Which, incidentally, is part of why it’s so weird when people are like, “Stop making art political!!” Like it never wasn’t political. It’s just a question of how obvious it is to any given person or group.

In my experience around image generation tech, it appears like it’s the sharing of cool generations among other people and the resulting human connection that is more attractive in the long-term than the “generate whatever” in private, which can be fun, similar as eating candy can be fun, but can get old fast if you overdo it. There’s a lot within that subject to unpack, but I’ve seen others point out something that appears to be true to an extent, which is that people don’t tend to be all that interested in others “AI art” and are more so interested in their own, which makes a kind of sense to me because the end result is usually shlocky flashy fast food “art” that might feel more meaningful to the person who spent hours experimenting with prompts to get to it. This might seem like a contradiction to the idea of sharing in “cool generations,” but it seems to me that such sharing is in part about the sharing itself, not entirely about the perceived quality of the art. Similar to how people can go to a movie together and maybe they’re critics about it or maybe they aren’t, but either way, they have that knowing that they shared the experience of seeing it simultaneously and can talk about what that experience was like.