Not Rea-AI-lly Art: AI art shouldn’t be considered real art

Young girl’s hand catching fireflies, sunset in a forest, painted style.

In just one click and about three seconds, I’d “created” a highly detailed and professional piece of artwork on Magic Studio’s AI art generator website.

The lighting in the digital painting gave a warm glow to the girl’s face and the dense forest around her made the scene magical.

But something was wrong. The girl had six fingers instead of five, a mistake human artists don’t make.

AI-generated art shouldn’t be considered real art. It takes away value from human-created artworks and completely opposes what art truly is — an authentic form of expression that conveys a deep meaning and message. 

Additionally, AI art generators shouldn’t be compared to human artists as they don’t require nearly the same amount of skill, time and effort.

Different forms of art include painting, music, literature and dance which are rightfully considered art — but AI is not part of that category. The difference is that art created by humans is a form of expression and creativity, something AI simply doesn’t have. Even though someone carefully typing out a prompt can be interpreted as a form of expression, they aren’t creating the art. AI is. 

Obviously, art can’t be strictly defined in one way or another, but it’s clear that a faceless robot generating art is completely different from an artist spending countless hours on their craft.

AI art is also in no way unique. It uses an algorithm called a neural network that finds patterns gathered from large datasets on the Internet, according to Adobe, with its own AI art generator. Given a prompt to generate a girl, for example, AI will generate the girl to the best of its ability based on what it’s learned from human-created art online. So without the creativity of human artists, AI art wouldn’t even be possible.

There’s no skill required to type a prompt for AI and let it do the work for you, the same way you can’t throw a blob of paint onto the canvas and call it “abstract.” Anyone can do it.

Since anyone’s able to use AI to create a three-second masterpiece, real artists are put out of jobs because the value behind their artwork disappears.

AI art created solely by a prompt isn’t protected by copyright, according to the United States Copyright Office, which means that legally people using AI can’t claim ownership of the artwork they generate. If “artists” who generate AI art don’t even have a copyright over their artwork, it can’t be considered theirs and they shouldn’t be regarded as real artists.

And, even though the aesthetics of artwork are important, the story behind these pieces is what gives them meaning. I can describe a scene with a young girl catching fireflies for an AI generator but it won’t know why it creates the piece — it only knows how to. 

Only human artists can capture the nostalgic feeling of running around their backyard barefoot as a kid, peering into the dark for a blink of light and then blindly grasping for the insects. They’ve experienced it.

Even as the use of AI becomes increasingly popular, AI art shouldn’t be used to compete with human art. If people really want to create meaningful artwork that AI can only attempt to imitate, they should do it themselves instead of asking a computer to do it for them.