300-year-old Tokyo comb company sells 30k-yen ($200) wooden hair combs

Definitely their skills at storytelling. Look at what is considered the top 5 comics of Batman for instance. Their stories are meh at best to forgettable and so far from what mangas offer. I think they work because the art is very good. I can’t wait to have someone who draws comics to coop with someone who does storytelling in mangas.

Italian coffee...in Italy, though? Similar with food: i believe a large part of the 'excellent taste' of anysomewhere is the water used to prepare food and drink.

Firstly, the entire premise of what I said is that creating AI images does take effort and creativity; I never once equated it to saying "make me a painting." But mere effort and creativity aren't the baseline for saying you're making art.

Let me describe a process: "You describe a piece of art using words and optionally inspiration pics to an entity, and embark on an iterative process where it gives you images, and you guide the entity with words until it yields a piece you are satisfied with. While you are directing the entity's efforts, ultimately, the work produced was generated by the entity, from it's own experiences and artistic sensibilities."

That entity could be a commissioned artist, or an AI image generator. There is no reality in which that entity could be a paint brush, Adobe illustrator, or an iPad drawing app. When you commission art, you don't say "make me a picture of X doing Y" and see what they make... There's a back-and-forth, preliminary sketches, iterations and adjustments along the way... Just like you use generative AI. It's just what it is. It's completely distinct from any form of creating art. You are commissioning art from a computer or a person. It's not even like it's always less creative. Art directors often have way more of a creative vision in what they're doing then the artists do— but the artist is still credited with making that piece because even though someone told them exactly what to make, they still made it.

I make algorithmic art. In fact, I make art using nearly every level of technological involvement possible, both professionally and as a hobby— from charcoal drawings on rough paper, to code-generated art using Adobe products, Houdini and other 3D applications, shaders, and all manor of other methods. When I am using code to generate algorithmic art, the product is likely even more deliberate and controlled, and the results even more intentional than with charcoal.

I also use Midjourney to generate mood boards, inspo pics, and references. It's great for that. I can get an idea of how something would look without scouring image sources, stock photos, etc. Sometimes I have to put quite a bit of effort into getting the exact angle or texture I want to see, and it's sometimes not up to the task. This is a creative, challenging process, but what it yields is not my art. It's an amalgam of other people's art assembled by a computer program to my approximate specifications.

> I'm not quite sure what you mean about crossing names out

I mean that no— using Midjourney et al to generate images from other people's art is not making art. At best, you could argue that Midjourney is the artist that you are commissioning art from. And just as it would be wrong to put your own name on work you commisioned from an artist, it's wrong to put your own name on work you commisioned from a computer.

> You wouldn't say Van Gogh's paintings were all meaningless fake art creations because an AI tool can output something which seems like them by simply asking it to so why is it this is the evidence there is no way to use an AI tool to truly "create" any kind of art at all?

I don't even know what you're trying to imply I'm arguing here. No artist's art is affected by someone else ripping it off. AI tools do have a place in actually creating art. Even using the images directly, perhaps, by directly manipulating them to make a collage. But no— no matter how many iterations, using whatever long string of bizarre references and terminology you like, you are still asking a computer to make art for you. The most basic fundamentals of composition and construction are the least controllable aspects of this process. No matter how specifically you reference styles or seemingly incongruous terms to trigger some kind of output, the generator is still making the overwhelming majority of the artistic decisions. I use these tools professionally — I know the difference. There are plenty of professional generative AI tools that aren't based on using words to ask it to make you something. Screen tracking and other tools in higher-end compositing software often uses generative AI. You're still executing your exact intention created by you just not having to do one technical part by hand. That doesn't exclude it from being art. The second you start asking something to make something for you, sorry. Nope.

Your essentially arguing that you should be able to claim credit for a book generated by your chatgpt prompts because professional writers use spelling and grammar checks.

You're right - I had no idea.

Wikipedia's "List of countries by suicide rate" makes for somber reading.

For women, Japan's suicide rate is still marginally higher than the US's. And S Korea's is much higher, first by far among rich countries.

The average quality of stuff is very high in Japan. That's reality, not marketing illusion.

Where the average is high, it's easy to believe that the peaks are also high - higher than in (say) China.