Raw LLM Responses

The key lies in the term "soulless". It's pretty intuitive how creativity and soul are used in the process of making art, using any tools available including digital ones that save time or make up for lack of skill. Conversely, it's pretty intuitive to see how generative AI made with a typed prompt is devoid of creativity or soul. For a less intuitive approach, it's hard to define and gets philosophical which is partially why I think it's so hard for people to convince gen AI users. But as an attempt, consider the role of the brain in any of the three examples: physical drawing, digital drawing, or generative AI. While the brain does have to "create" the words for your prompt and you might use genuine creativity in deciding what you want to ask it to tweak based on your aesthetic tastes, you aren't actually "creating" the image. You're creating the concept and letting the computer do the actual physical creation. When you do digital art, you might let the computer help you achieve your desired creation by letting you fill in the colours quicker, or smoothing out your lines, but you're still deciding on what you want the piece to look like and controlling those tools by hand to achieve that image. It's still creativity and genuine craft done by hand and mind. You could make more nuanced arguments if we had generative AI that takes more real and precise inputs regarding where you want the lines and colours and having it deal with the nuance and styling, but that's for another day (and still objectively far less soulful and original to the artist) And I suppose you could also argue that the digital drawing tools aren't generative based on other peoples existing work. They're predictably programmed. A line smoother will simply transform your lines according to a set mathematical formula to average things out and provide a smoother line. A gen AI software actually takes full images made by other artists and compiles them together with, "artificial" intelligence. Not even real intelligence. It's still following a code but it's not a predictable transformation. It depends on content generated randomly by humans to create, not simply transform your creations like filling in a colour or smudging a spot.