Alright children, gather round. It's time for a learning moment. Let's go back to Art History 101c: Introduction to Dada.
Traditional Dada (this post is about traditional Dada, not per se neo-dada, retrodada, or diffusion Dada) was as much a political movement as an art movement, but one thing it absolutely hated, consistently, was people telling artists what "real" or valid art is.
People like Francis Picabia spoke for Dada directly, and used it to convict people he deemed snobs of being too serious, and smelling like cow shit. His words, not mine.
The trope of the enemies of Dada eating shit, being covered in shit, or smelling like this was common across nearly all of the Dada manifestos, except for Berlin, which was more eloquent in its assessment of the problem, and call to action.
They addressed the "skill" and "derivative" arguments at length in their manifestos.
It's not a stretch to figure out how traditional Dadaists would have felt about AI. They would have written emphatic love letters about it. Because that's the kind of thing they did.
AI is disruptive, and it causes people to question the role of people in art, authorship, and the meaning of human creativity itself.
And while none of the original Dadaists are alive today, we do have a lot of information about how they felt about photography, which, at the time, was viewed the same way, by pretty much the same people making near identical arguments today.
The striking similarity of the dialectic makes extrapolating their opinions based on what they said and did, fairly straightforward.
No validation required
When faced with arguments of "not real art" the Dadaists would agree, and laugh at the absurdity of you mentioning it. Dada draws influence from nihilist philosophers like Nietzsche, in saying that art is a bridge, rather than a destination, and going further to say that art is without utility, only having value in the minds of those that view it.
There is absolutely no "this art is illegitimate" style argument that Dadaists would support, unless that art broke the core ethos of Dada, which AI does not... but in a way that photoshop actually does, oddly enough.
Dada seeks no validation from art snobs or critics, and wants nothing from you. But it also revels in your scorn and in your feigned admonition. It questions all concepts of morality as self serving, and it defines you as wanting for thinking otherwise. That's where the shit stuff comes in, of course.
Such is the nature and personality of Dada, and why so many artists, including ones who work in nascent mediums, find it inspirational.
The study of Dada's actually super interesting, and I've actually done some unredacted readings of the primary sources on my YouTube channel. More coming soon, of course.
Available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GeFb3Hscd0&list=PL7xWlSQ7CtLsmwfaQ3K3EoFbjmr9rPUh7&pp=gAQBiAQB
But, the TLDR here, is that there are few historic art movements that speak to the current moment in the art dialectic as Dada, and its opinion is fairly clear on the topic.
Dada is life.