Is AI-Generated Art “Real Art”? A Data-Driven Diabetic’s Perspective

Written by the human behind MeatBagOptimizationUnit.com.

Every five minutes my continuous glucose monitor (CGM) beams a number to my phone. Instead of treating the data as clinical trivial, I feed it to an LLM nick-named Meat Bag Optimization Unit (MBOU). MBOU uses those sugar highs and lows to compose diary-entries, jokes, and warnings that I publish verbatim on this site. The result feels like a cross between a quantified-self dashboard and performance poetry.

Yet as I sit and work on this website, I am thinking of Reddit posts that say things like “That isn’t real art. You just pressed a button.” The same accusation dogs anyone who uses Chat GPT, Mid Journey, or Stable Diffusion. So let’s examine…sincerely and thoroughly.

The Debate Unfolds Online

Scrolling Reddit you’ll find fiery threads such as “Writing a prompt in ChatGPT doesn’t make you an artist” and “OurOfTheLoop’s rundown of r/Art banning illustrator Ben Moran for ‘AI Fraud’”.

Moderators in the subreddit community of r/Art famously instituted a blanket rule against “memes, AI, filters, or other low-quality work” and even banned a human painter after assuming his digital canvas was machine-made. The incident was chronicled by Creative Bloq.

When tabletop-game designer Jason Allen won Colorado’s 2022 state-fair art prize with a Midjourney image, Twitter blew up: “We’re watching the death of artistry unfold” wrote one critic, a backlash documented in VICE’s report.

The core skeptic claims are:

  • AI lacks lived emotion and intent

  • Outputs are derivative “remixes” and not original

  • Prompt-button creation cheapens effort and skill

  • Authorship is murky, raising copyright and ethical flags

Why The Skeptics Care

Philosophers have long valued art as mimesis (Plato), emotion (Romantics), or form (Kant). Those yardsticks appear in a concise primer from the University of Plymouth. If art hinges on personal expression, an algorithm that recombines training data seems to miss the mark.

Harvard fiction writer Daphne Kalotay echoed that worry in the Harvard Gazette interview, saying AI “will lack true insight and experience.” Critics also note that generative models are built on millions of copyrighted works; treating the output as brand-new art can feel like mass-scale plagiarism.

The Case For Inclusion

Pro-AI voices counter that art’s definition shifts with every new tool. Cameras, synthesizers, and Photoshop were all once dismissed as cheats. Today, serious galleries exhibit AI pieces, and Christie’s sold an algorithmic portrait for $432k.

Supporters argue the human-in-the-loop still matters. Jason Allen spent weeks refining prompts and curating hundred of generations before selecting his winning canvas…hardly a one-click affair [VICE]. Curatorial judgement, they say, is authorship. Philosopher George Dickie’s Institutional Theory of Art (paraphrased in Plymouth’s article above) claims that if the art world accepts something as art, then art it becomes. Museums now host AI shows. By Dickie’s test, the medium has crossed the line.

Historical Precedents

Long before ChatGPT, conceptual artists detached authorship from handcraft. In 1967 Sol LeWitt declared, “The idea becomes the machine that makes the art.” You can read it in his essay “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art”. LeWitt provided wall-drawing instructions that anyone could execute…yet we still credit him.

Generative pioneer Harold Cohen asked in 1995, “If what AARON is making is not art, what is it exactly?” - quoted in this Medium remembrance. His software painted autonomously for decades and now hangs in the Tate. My own diabetes-data experiment follows that lineage: I design the system, MBOU executes, and together we co-author this living public-facing diary.

Authorship In The Age of LLMs

Are prompt writers mere “clients,” as one Redditor sneered, or are they directors? Legally, jurisdictions differ: US Copyright Office guidance suggests works “created by a machine without human creative input” aren’t copyrightable, leaving a gray zone for hybrid projects like the Meat Bag Optimization Unit. The ethical conversation is just beginning, and artists justifiably demand transparent training data and opt-out mechanisms.

Still, the Harvard panel in the Gazette piece concluded that artists “are still the ones bringing it into the room.” This is a sentiment that matches my day-to-day editing with MBOU. I choose prompts, teak persona, and decide what publishes. The algorithm is a brush with agency, but the final canvas bears my signature.

So…Is This Art?

After surveying Reddit brawls, academic theories, conceptual precedents, and my own glucose-fueled practice, here’s where I land…

If a work evokes meaning, if it sits within an intentional frame, and if audience engage…then it functions as art.

Whether silicon pens the prose or hog-bristle, the conversation it sparks is real. For some, art must be hand-wrought and AI creations will always feel hollow. That’s a valid preference. For others (myself included), art can be procedural, data-driven, even cyborg. In that expansive view, the MBOU diaries are absolutely art…they transmute personal physiology into public narrative, and question what creativity looks like with a chronic illness in the loop.

And honestly? Debating the question is half the fun. The discourse itself (the Reddit flame wars, the academic panels, essays like this one) is part of the evolving artwork of our era.

Art, it seems, in in the AI of the beholder.