AI art generation has rapidly evolved from niche curiosity to a mainstream part of the creative process. It’s used in illustrations, concept art, marketing images and brand assets. Businesses benefit from the speed, low cost and near-infinite variations of their output. Conversely, many artists and designers oppose the rise of AI art and are frustrated and anxious about its development.
Concerns extend beyond the technology at hand to address authorship, creativity, and labor. Artists are responding to the real economic, ethical and cultural impacts of AI on their livelihoods. They’re also concerned about how society views their work. If you’re a designer, brand creator, or visual communicator, be aware of these concerns before using AI in your work.
Research Shows People Judge AI Art Differently
Resistance towards AI art is not limited to artists. A peer-reviewed article in the journal “Computers in Human Behavior” found that people’s perception of creative work varies significantly depending on whether it was produced by AI or a human. Four experiments with a sample size of 1,708 people found that artwork made by artificial intelligence was rated as less creative and less awe-inspiring than the same artwork labeled as human-made.
The results also suggested that the response was stronger among people who believe creativity is uniquely human. They believe that AI art is inferior to human art and threatens human identity. The results may explain why discussions about AI art often contain more emotion than information.
Why Artists Hate AI Art
Artists’ attitudes toward AI art vary widely, and their concerns often center on practical and professional considerations or ethical issues. Here are some of the most cited reasons in online forums, on social media and in articles on the topic.
1. Devalues Human Creative Output
For many artists, creativity involves human intent, perception and interpretation. By contrast, AI does not generate meaning or ideas. It identifies and combines patterns in existing data. If AI content creation is not distinguished from human labor, artists will feel their training, decision-making and concept generation have been reduced to automated, replaceable actions.
The fear increases when AI art is the end rather than the starting point of a creative process. Designers note that clients often do not recognize the difference between designing and generating AI art.
2. Creates Economic Pressure
Rather than being slowly integrated, AI tools are being rapidly adopted at scale, often outpacing the development of relevant ethical and legal frameworks. The language learning model (LLM) market is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 35.9% from 2024 to 2030, as more AI tools are integrated into business and design processes. Many artists feel AI is taking over their jobs.
Although progress is rapid, models trained on datasets should be used with care. Unless best practices for consent, attribution and compensation are developed, creative work may be integrated into systems that do not protect the people whose work helped train them.
3. Uses Original Art Without Consent
One of the most consistently noted criticisms of AI-generated art is that image-generation models were trained on datasets scraped from online sources, including copyrighted artworks uploaded by artists who did not give permission for their work to be used.
From an artistic perspective, it seems like intellectual property theft. When images are sold and AI is monetized, it feels like their work is generating value for a tool that will take their job.
4. Steals Style Through Mimicry
Acquiring a personal style through years of practice and experimentation may feel weakened when AI generates consistent, recognizable images. Many artists feel it is an erosion of contemporary art’s identity, even without directly copying any one specific image.
For illustrators and designers who take years to develop their own voices, the prospect that prompting could reproduce someone’s style poses a significant challenge to traditional concepts of authorship and creativity in the arts.
5. Reinforces Biases
AI image systems can have biases and then overcorrect. For example, in February 2024, after The Verge discovered that Google’s Gemini, an AI image generation system, was generating anachronistic images of the founding fathers of the United States and Nazi soldiers as black or women, despite historical evidence to the contrary.
The model was trying to fix biased data and attempted to use diversity to counter it. Although this was intended to be more inclusive, it produced inaccurate historical information and failed to address the underrepresentation. Google acknowledged the issue and paused the feature while working on a solution.
The problem for artists and designers is that, at its core, AI doesn’t understand context, history or what’s true. It only understands patterns and prompts. When used in educational, editorial or branding contexts, AI-generated images can spread misinformation or otherwise undermine credibility due to insufficient human oversight.
Many artists argue against treating AI imagery as a neutral authority – it can help reduce errors, but absent human oversight, it can just as easily reinforce prejudice and inaccuracy.
6. Challenges the Meaning of Creativity
At its core, AI art challenges the customary definition of creativity, which is an intentional expression of an artist’s experience, emotion, context, and personality. AI does not see the world, have beliefs, or make meaning, so artists find it dilutes the term “creative” when the technology produces output, which critics then describe as creative in the sense of human creativity. The philosophical nuance is an important reason why debates about AI art are so personal.
Using AI Ethically Without Losing Creative Ground
Despite the backlash, many artists and designers have not completely rejected AI. Instead, they’re looking for ways to use it without sacrificing their authorship and value.
According to New York University, artificial intelligence helps creative minds, but is limited to supporting exploration and learning when incorporated into support tools. In this case, the human acts as an authority in developing, assessing and executing the creative output.
Ethical considerations related to AI use include being transparent about its use, delimiting the boundaries of authorship, and ensuring human control over decision-making. Artists who view AI as a tool for improving their art may be less affected by such challenges.
AI in Art Works Best With Boundaries
AI art highlights the gaps in how people value, protect, and understand creative art. Artists have valid points about labor, consent and what it means to create something. At the same time, the technology is not going away.
If used purposefully, consciously, ethically, and in tandem with existing processes, AI can be a tool for creativity. It may replace some existing art-making processes, but it will also give artists more time for the creative side of their work. For designers and small business owners, challenging these boundaries is not a matter of resisting progress, but finding a balanced approach.
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