There is tons of low effort generative art, but there’s tons of low effort art in every medium: photography, drawing, sculpture, weaving, etc. I wouldn’t dismis

There is tons of low effort generative art, but there’s tons of low effort art in every medium: photography, drawing, sculpture, weaving, etc. I wouldn’t dismiss an entire community/movement for this reason. But it’s worth mentioning that perceived effort / time spent is not always an important metric in art. Look at Pollock, Malevich, or Ellsworth Kelly for example, where you may feel anybody could do this work in an hour or two. One issue with the term is that it includes commercial work quite often. There is enough interest within tech that you can be a “generative artist” and perhaps make a living by floating 3D cubes. I don’t think that makes you an artist, nor does it make your art “good”. If you want to see some “good” generative art, perhaps look into it’s history including Vera Molnar, Georg Nees, Harold Cohen, Manfred Mohr. If you want to see a more modern interpretation, look into Tomás Saraceno, Elias Crespin, Anders Hoff, Tyler Hobbs, Random International, onformative, UVA, FIELD, Variable.io, Nervous System, and Scott Eaton. These are a range of artists / design studios, not all of them solely focus on art-making (sometimes it’s commercial), and not all of them code (generative art != code), but they are all doing important work in different ways and are far removed from your friend pushing simple doodles on clients.