You've probably seen the conversation play out a lot of times that someone will talk about how AI can be used for self expression. Then someone will respond with a long speech about how it's not really their self expression because they didn't draw every line and so on. I can add more details, but you get the gist, you've probably seen this conversation many times before.

Now the thing is, I don't *totally* disagree with a steelmanned version of this. It's true that if someone makes a simple ai prompt that they didn't control as many of the details as someone doing it by hand, so they are expressing less. Of course, AI gets more complicated than that, and you can do something higher effort if you want. But that's a topic for another day.

But I wanted to focus on the general claim. Which seems to be something like this. That any detail you present doesn't count as meaningful self expression unless it's something you did by hand, controlling the creation of that specific detail.

The problem with this claim is... that it throws -all- self expression done by everyone everywhere that isn't hand made art under the bus. 

When people decorate their room, most stuff they put in it isn't hand made. But we still talk about it like they are expressing themselves. We even act nervous sometimes if we go to a place that seems to not express anything. The same is true of what clothes people wear. But how many people make their own clothes? Even in circles known for adding patches onto jackets they normally don't make the jacket itself, or even most of the patches.

At this point the person making this point isn't left with many options for consistency. Their only chance to salvage this discrepancy is to insist that that's different since while they don't make all the building blocks they still arrange them. But... that's the same thing they just criticized with ai. That deciding the arrangement of, or choice of use of elements you didn't design all of by hand isn't personal expression in a particularly meaningful way.

In essence what is happening is that in every other case people accept that there are different ways to do self expression. But when it comes to using ai in art all the sudden self expression is judged based on this overly pure and idealistic idea of how art is done that isn't even accurate to traditional art. After all, one of the most well known quotes about art is Bob Ross talking about how a lot of art is happy accidents. And anyone familiar with doing it is of course familiar with this fact.

None of this is to say that something with little expression might not be fairly flat. But being too absolutist tends to erase nuance. And hell, if someone doesn't have a lot to say and wants to just express something simple that isn't necessarily a crime either. Even if it's fair to want the amount of flood of simple expressions to be limited in certain spaces.

Why does it seem like a lot of people want to throw the idea of self expression under the bus just to take a jab at AI?