Yes. A thousand hours confers you with a much greater understanding of what it's capable of, its constraints, and how to best take advantage of these.

By comparison, consider photography: it is ostensibly only a few controls and a button, but getting quality results requires the user to understand the language of the medium.

> What the pro generative AI crowd doesn't seem to understand is that good art is not about _execution_ it's about _making deliberate choices_. While a master painter or guitarist may indeed pull off incredible technical feats, their execution is not the art in and of itself, it is widening the amount of choices they can make.

This is often not true, as evidenced by the pre-existing fields of generative art and evolutionary art. It's also a pretty reductive definition of art: viewers can often find art in something with no intentional artistry behind it.

> I've never met anyone who has spent significant time creating art react to generative AI as anything more than a toy.

It's a big world out there, and you haven't met everyone ;) Just this last week, I went to two art exhibitions in Paris that involved generative AI as part of the artwork; here's one of the pieces: https://www.muhka.be/en/exhibitions/agnieszka-polska-flowers...

We were told that what we were doing didn't require as much skill as whatever the previous generation were doing to sample music and make new tracks. In hindsight, of course you find it easy to cite the prominent successes that you know from the generation. That's arguing from survivorship bias and availability bias.

But those successes were never the point: the publishers and artists were pissed off at the tens of thousands of teenagers remixing stuff for their own enjoyment and forming small yet numerous communities and subcultures globally over the net. Many of us never became famous so you can cite our fame as proof of skill but we made money hosting parties at the local raves with beats we remixed together ad hoc and that others enjoyed.

> The artists creating those projects clearly have hundreds if not thousands of hours of practice differentiating them from someone who just started pasting MP3s together in a DAW yesterday.

But they all began as I did, by being someone who "just started pasting MP3s together" in my bedroom. Darude, Skrillex, Burial, and all the others simply kept doing it longer than those who decided they had to get an office job instead.

The teenagers today are in exactly the same position, except with vastly more powerful tools and the entire corpus of human creativity free to download, whether in the public domain or not.

I guess in response to your "required skill and talent", I'm saying that skill is something that's developed within the context of the technology a generation has available. But it is always developed, then viewed as such in hindsight.

Yes, absolutely. Not necessarily in apparent execution without knowledge of intent (though, often, there, too), but in the scope of meaningful choices that fhey can make and reflect with the tools, yes.

This is probably even more pronounced with use of open models than the exclusively hosted ones, because more choices and controls are exposed to the user (with the right toolchain) than with most exclusively-hosted models.