Hey, these are really great!!

I really enjoy conversations around the questions you've raised, because I don't think there's a single simple "right" answer to any of this, and I find the complexity kind of beautiful and definitely intellectually stimulating. There's a world of varying opinions on the topic, all (or at least mostly) valid, but I personally wouldn't say that the AI is faking art, nor that the AI itself is being creative. A lot of the conversation in the nascent AI Art part of the generative art world right now revolves around the very questions you're raising here (as well as a lot of other really interesting philosophical/ethical/artistic questions). My personal take, as someone who has been pretty deeply involved in AI art for a couple of years, and IRL visual art for 20+ years, is that the AI is an incredibly powerful generative tool, but it requires human vision/intelligence/artistic instinct to output anything truly "artistic" or original. It's often really easy to tell when someone is just relying on the AI to give them an easy, default result without putting a lot of serious work into prompt engineering, weight experimentation, etc, before generation.

On the surface, a lot of the AI tools look like simple "ask and ye shall receive" conduits that are devoid of creativity, but when you run them without a simplified frontend, there are a ton of weights and settings in every single tool that add a huge degree of complexity to the process of creation. Even minor adjustments to one weight may greatly impact the final result. Nobody really understands what all of the presets/weights do yet, nor how they interact with one another (not even the people building the tools), and a bunch of us (myself included) are running wide-ranging studies to figure it out and produce visual guides.

I manage a curated library of AI Google Colab notebooks, if you feel like experimenting more! VQGAN is great, but it's a bit limited in figural capability in a way that tools like Disco Diffusion are not.

By the way, I've been an enormous fan of your work for several years, and it's really cool to see you experimenting with tools I know and use :)