I love that in these discussions every piece of art is always high art and some comment on the human condition, never just grunt-work filler, or some crappy display ad.

Code can be artisanal and beautiful, or it can be plumbing. The same is true for art assets.

That's a fun framing. Let me try using it to define art.

Art is an abstract way of manipulating aesthetics so that the person feels or thinks a thing.

Doesn't sound very elusive nor wrong to me, while remaining remarkably similar to your coding definition.

> while asking questions about what it means to be human

I'd argue that's more Philosophy's territory. Art only really goes there to the extent coding does with creativity, which is to say

> the machine does a thing

to the extent a programmer has to first invent this thing. It's a bit like saying my body is a machine that exists to consume water and expel piss. It's not wrong, just you know, proportions and timing.

This isn't to say I classify coding and art as the same thing either. I think one can even say that it is because art speaks to the person while code speaks to the machine, that people are so much more uppity about it. Doesn't really hit the same as the way you framed this though, does it?

> Art eludes definition while asking questions about what it means to be human.

All art? Those CDs full of clip art from the 90's? The stock assets in Unity? The icons on your computer screen? The designs on your wrapping paper? Some art surely does "[elude] definition while asking questions about what it means to be human", and some is the same uninspired filler that humans have been producing ever since the first the first teenagers realized they could draw penis graffiti. And everything else is somewhere in between.

The images clair obscur generated hardly "eludes definition while asking questions about what it means to be human.".

The game is art according to that definition while the individual assets in it are not.

Are you telling me that, for example, rock texture used in a wall is "asking questions about what it means to be human"?

If some creator with intentionality uses an AI generated rock texture in a scene where dialogue, events, characters and angles interact to tell a story, the work does not ask questions about what it means to be human anymore because the rock texture was not made by him?

And in the same vein, all code is soldering cables so the machine does a thing? Intentionality of game mechanics represented in code, the technical bits to adhere or work around technical constraints, none of it matters?

Your argument was so bad that it made me reflexively defend Gen AI, a technology that for multiple reasons I think is extremely damaging. Bad rationale is still bad rationale though.

You're just someone who can't see the beauty of an elegant algorithm.

Speak for yourself.

I consider some code I write art.