I would disagree with that. Much of creating art is a feedback loop. An artist rarely, if ever, has a fully formed picture in their mind of what a finished piece will look like, and it's even more rare that the final piece conforms to that image. In the process of creating, the artist takes in what is in progress and has to adjust accordingly.

The final piece is influenced by the medium it's created in, the process of creating it, constraints both momentary and well-known, and the context of the time and whims of the artist.

The billions of images and its software determine its outputs right? Is there the same analogy for humans?

I don’t think so. It’s much harder to imagine a deterministic story of how we developed set theory for example. Nothing empirical forces us into set theory. It’s not needed by physics for example.

The billions of images and software plus the entered phrase fully determine the output right? What possibly similar story gave rise to things like set theory?

I don’t think 99% of the population or even art students could paint Dürer’s rabbit no matter what training or incentive was offered.

Also the history of pigments is fascinating. There’s a whole lot lot more to painting than brush strokes.

Is human thought only at the outset of a piece of art?

>> In the end, painting is 99% a practiced skill, and 1% original human thought

True, but the line between art and great art is 99% thought and 1% skill.

That is far too reductive

lmao no