Is AI Changing Art as We Know It? Yes. That’s Not as Bad as You Think

Imagine you’re a painter in the early 20th century.

You’re no Georgia O’Keefe, but you do all right. You specialize in realistic family portraits. Business is booming.

There’s just one thing that’s been niggling at the back of your mind, planting a tiny seed of doubt about the future of your career: this newfangled technology called the Kodak camera.

At first, when you saw its outputs, it didn’t even occur to you that it could possibly be a threat. These pale monochrome images could hardly be called portraits. Sure, they were realistic, but they were ugly and colorless. No one was going to hang that on their wall. There was no way this photography thing was going to replace portrait painters.

Then, one day in the 1930s, you learn that cameras can now produce photos in color. You feel a twinge of anxiety, but when you see an example, you laugh again. The so-called colors are dull and lifeless. These things can’t hold a candle to your work.

Then, in 1939, you attend a screening of The Wizard of Oz.

When Dorothy opens the door to Oz, the entire theater audibly gasps, and you loudest of all.

The colors are stunning. Vivid. Bright. You can’t help but think of a painting you did recently of a young girl in a blue dress with shining brown hair like Judy Garland’s. Her shoes were a dull brown leather. They didn’t sparkle red in your painting.

You stumble out of that theater into a nearby pub. You stare into the middle distance over a glass of whiskey.

Then a woman slides into the stool next to yours.

She is dressed very strangely with a dress made of an odd drapey material and a scarf wrapped around her hair. You eye her suspiciously as she orders a glass of club soda. She looks a little battle-worn, like she’s traveled a long way. She catches your eye and smiles uncomfortably.

“I just watched The Wizard of Oz,” you blurt out. “My life as an artist is over.”

She hesitates, then says, “I’m so sorry.”

That’s all the encouragement you need, and soon you have spilled out all your anxieties in front of this stranger. About how this camera thing is eventually going to put you out of business. About how no one is going to want your work anymore when they see the bright hues of color photography.

“And you know what the worst thing is?” You bang your glass on the bar and your whiskey slops a little. “These photographers, these people developing this cursed technology–their work isn’t even art. It’s completely soulless. They can’t see through to the heart of a person and express it on the canvas. Their images are just… flat, mechanical. It will never see or capture the world the way a human painter does. But most people don’t know the difference. They just care about their pockets. Soon the real painters will go out of business because no one will want to pay for real art anymore. I will lose my livelihood to a soulless machine.”

The woman listens with rapt attention. When you fall silent, she hesitates again, then says:

“So, I know you’re not going to believe me, but I’m actually from the future.”

You snort a little whiskey through your nose. It burns really bad.

“Really. I’m from 2025. Never mind how I got here, I’m here as a literary device, I’m a writer, I like literary devices. Anyway,” she hurries on, “what if I told you that in 2025, painters still exist?”

You’re so desperate for comfort at this point, you want so much to believe her. You turn to look at her, your eyes streaming from your still-burning nose. “Really?” you say.

“Really. There are still lots of artists. I mean… it’s not easy as a career. Most people can’t make a living from it. But there are careers that involve artistic skills that can be very lucrative. What’s more,” she says, “photography is now considered its own art form. It’s not the same as painting. It’s just another kind of tool for creating images. People still enjoy paintings as art. It’s just used differently than it is in your time.”

“Huh,” you say, dabbing at your eyes with your handkerchief.

A smile pricks at one corner of her mouth. “Yeah,” she says, taking a swig of her soda. “Wait until I tell you about AI.”

AI Anxiety

If you are a creative person living in 2025, you have likely experienced some degree of anxiety about the role of AI in the future of your craft.

If you are a visual artist–perhaps, one who admires the work of Studio Ghibli–you may have experienced a horrible sinking feeling while scrolling through your social media feeds recently.

I work in hi-tech as a marketing writer, and I’ve been experimenting with LLMs since good old 2022. For a long time, my use of AI writing tools was limited to the occasional brainstorm (it didn’t produce ideas that were good, but it could get close enough to get my own wheels turning) and maybe the phrasing of a paragraph so generic and boring I didn’t want to waste time formulating it myself (and I would edit it pretty thoroughly before using it).

However, the technology has been developing rapidly, and I’ve been using it more and more regularly.

Sometime last year, I trained a custom GPT for a particular purpose that produced such good results, it sent me into a bit of an existential crisis. Was this the future of my career? Feeding raw material into a chatbot and having it spit out a well-written article?

What if I get so used to getting AI to brainstorm and write my first drafts and pinpoint the right phrasing, I lose the ability to do those things myself?

And of course, the scariest question: what if AI gets so good at what I do that my own skills become obsolete? If any random person who can put a decent prompt together can produce a highly polished, brand-relevant, fact-checked, search-engine-optimized, beautiful blog post in a matter of seconds… why would anybody pay me to produce one manually?

Can Lived Experience Save Us?

There’s a copywriter I follow, Eddie Shleyner, who published an intriguing piece aimed at assuaging that fear. (It’s short. Go read it. I’ll wait.) In the piece, he demonstrates the difference between AI-prompted copy and human-produced copy by comparing two descriptions of the moment he met his newborn son: one written by ChatGPT, and one written by him. He writes:

AI can give writers and copywriters the dots to help us start writing (which, often, is the hardest part).

But you know, it cannot connect the dots like we can. It can’t be personal like us, human like us. It can’t feel the gravity of a profound moment, like a birth, much less the essence of another person. These are uniquely human things. And so, AI cannot write like us. It can’t tell stories like us. It can’t. Because the specifics, the details, the granularities we collect through our lived experiences belong to us.

Mmmm….

Yes, but….

AI will get better.

It will get a lot better.

Very, very fast.

It will never be able to write from its own experience, but it will get better at imitating the way humans write about their experiences.

It can already do this with the right prompt.

Here’s a prompt I gave ChatGPT: I want you to write a short vignette describing the moment you, a human man, meet your newborn son for the first time. I want you to use a realist, minimalist style that expresses emotion through showing rather than telling: instead of telling me what you feel, imply it with actions and physical sensations.

Here’s what it produced:

The hospital room smells like antiseptic and something softer—powder, maybe, or milk. Machines beep in slow, steady rhythms. The fluorescent lights hum.

The nurse places him in my arms, and he’s smaller than I thought he would be. Lighter. His head fits in my palm, damp and warm. His skin is red and wrinkled, his fists curled tight like he’s still expecting resistance. His mouth opens, then closes again, as if testing the air.

I shift my grip, and his weight settles against my chest. His breath is fast, shallow. His eyelashes are barely visible. One hand, no bigger than my thumb, stretches out and catches on my shirt. The fingers flex. Hold.

Something in my throat tightens. I swallow, but it stays.

Eddie’s version is still clearly better. This output is not Pulitzer Prize material. But it’s a LOT better than the AI output he quoted in his post. And if I try again in a year or two… who knows?

In the Eye of the Beholder

Here’s the thing, my fellow creatives.

ChatGPT didn’t write that piece on its own.

It was prompted. By a person.

A person who knows what good writing looks and sounds like. And knew how to direct it to give better results.

I wouldn’t be able to produce good work using AI if I didn’t know good writing when I see it.

I agree with Eddie that human experience is what sets us apart from AI. But I don’t think it’s the experience we are describing in the piece that sets us apart. I think it’s our experience of the piece itself.

I have said that there is no such thing as good art and bad art: there is only art that resonates and art that doesn’t resonate.

Art can’t resonate with a machine.

A machine can evaluate art based on objective measures or a set of human standards. It may get increasingly good at guessing what might resonate with humans. There may even come a day when it will be better at that than we are. (It might not take much. Even the so-called expert humans aren’t always so great at knowing what will resonate. *cough*Disney remakes*cough*) But it will never experience art the way a human does. And it will never be able to extract meaning from art, or be changed by it, like humans.

What I’m saying is: art is created for humans. It’s a means for human connection. And that means that producing, curating, and delivering art to others will always be a human’s job–no matter how many AI tools that human leverages along the way.

Who Does Art Belong To?

The way we create art will change and evolve. Just like how it changed and evolved when the camera was introduced, or, for that matter, Photoshop, computer animation, and other more recent technologies that have changed the way we create art. But ultimately art will still belong to us, because ultimately, art belongs to whoever is experiencing it.

That’s why I don’t think it’s the end of the world that people are using AI to create images of themselves in the style of a well-known artist. Of course it’s unethical to train an AI model using a certain artist’s work without their permission. And of course it would be extremely unethical to create something using that artist’s work and present it as my own.

But the way I see it, when I offer my art to the world, it’s not meant to be mine anymore. It’s supposed to be absorbed, processed, and digested by the audience. It’s supposed to change them. So if I saw people creating AI images of themselves in my style–I would be delighted. It would mean that my art reached them, and touched them, and meant something to them. Every image like that would be a tribute to the effect my art had on them.

Perhaps mine is an unpopular opinion among writers and artists, but I actually think it’s not a bad thing that AI is democratizing the arts. Sure: let the whole world become eloquent, well-phrased writers, even if their grammar is naturally atrocious. Let the whole world be able to recreate a vision in their minds and turn it into a shareable image, even if they have no hand-eye coordination. All the better for me to get a clearer window into their unique and beautiful minds.

Yes, most people can’t paint a realistic portrait of someone without studying and practicing that craft. But literally anyone can snap a photo of someone they love. Why should capturing an image be the exclusive property of only those who know how to paint? One way of creating art doesn’t need to take away from the value of the other.

So… How Do You Stay Relevant as an Artist Through the AI Revolution?

I don’t actually have a time machine, so I can’t tell you what the future will bring. Maybe I’ll look back at this post in a few years and laugh at how naive I was back before the AI apocalypse.

But from what I know now, I can tell you this.

If you are a creative person in 2025 who wants to continue sharing their work and staying relevant… don’t turn your nose up at AI.

Approach it with curiosity and humility.

Experiment with it.

Learn what it can do for you.

You may decide that the answer is nothing, and you’d rather stick to traditional methods. (I wrote all of this post, except the ChatGPT output obviously, without any assistance from AI.) But don’t shun it as a disgrace to the art world or an abomination. And don’t run away from it.

The art world is evolving. You can evolve with it.