I changed my mind today.

I used to be an advocate of classifying AI-generated image as art, because at the end of the day, art is something that begets emotion in the viewers. It doesn't matter how it is generated, either by a human making many creative choices that are inspired by previous art work, or an algorithm making statistical choices that are pattern matched from its vast image database. There is parallelism in them, and I couldn't justify a piece of drawing being considered as art just because the pixels are arranged by human.

But then I realize something. If anything that begets emotion is art, is the magnificence of nature also art? We consider some photograph of the Grand Canyon art, but we don't call the Grand Canyon itself art. The two may look identical, but the former has a hidden message, conveyed either intentionally or subconsciously when a photographer presses the shutter button. The latter has nothing. It's just a piece of nature, beautiful and powerful, yet created by natural processes devoid of any meaning or emotion.

Art cares even if nobody is looking. Nature doesn't care even if everyone is looking. This, I believe, is the difference between human- and AI-generated image. An AI-generated piece is no more art than the Grand Canyon. It is merely a statistical process, beautiful and awe-inspiring, but it doesn't care.