I had an art (drawing) teacher who made me go outside and find a stick, the cruder the better. Then she said okay, now draw this flower -- incredibly delicate and complex -- using just the stick and india ink. It was impossible. That was the point. She wanted me to *create* something, not attempt to replicate a photograph. My cognitive dissonance nearly brought me to tears. In the end, though, I liked what I drew, including the long drip of ink running crookedly down the paper. It was messy and crude, yet somehow an essence of the flower came through. The process of doing, and feeling, is essential.
That experience was more than a foundational lesson, it was an epiphany. It changed how I *see*. In a million years AI could never replicate or even poorly mimic the indefinable human connection, or essence, of this drawing. As you said, it's the human process that instills art with that visceral something that we all immediately recognize and resonate with (even if we can't adequately define it).
In 1903 James Joyce defined art as "the human disposition of [...] matter for an aesthetic end", i.e. created by someone consciously manipulating materials solely to create beauty. It's a straightforward, seemingly bulletproof definition—except Joyce then defines photography (a non-human disposition of matter) and furniture (which exists for practical, not only aesthetic, ends) as not being art.
Most efforts to definitionally exclude AI from being considered "art" get tied into the same knots, a problem I feel your approach of emphasising intentionality and process helps sidestep, focusing not on a narrow technical definition but on the experience of creating and engaging with beauty. I don't agree with every point (I can accept some forms of artifice/advertising as falling under the "art" umbrella), but it echoes my own objection to AI "art"—that the pleasure of art exists in the challenge I have to do in expressing ideas beautifully or making sense of them in someone else's creation, and taking the difficulty out of it takes away the pleasure.
It's interesting to see the way AI, specially image and video generation tools, has evolved in the last 4 to 5 years. The most distinctive evolution, I think, is the transformation of AI from a tool of experimentation to a tool of mass production. If one looks to early "AI artifacts" (such as the works from Helly Herndon or previous works produced by image generation tools such as ArtBreeder or Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN)) one can see that the difference between input and output was HUGE. The machine was truly stochastic, random, esotheric and confusing. Those dimensions — of what I would describe as "machine unconcious" — were the most prominent dimensions of any AI work, making them truly baffling and eary. In other words, they seem to reflect something uncontrollable in those models. In those cases, the artist was a truly curator, I think.
Nowadays AI in general is commercialized as a tool for production. For a process that NEEDS to be standarized and not stochastic. In any case — be they words or images — the result must reflect an intention, and must resemble what ones asks for.
To think about these early examples of AI helps us, I think, to broaden our understanding of the capabilities of these tools as creative tools, and also help us articulate the dimensions that are lacking in current AI models.
These reflections also remind of a beautiful piece from L.M Sacasas that talks about AI being "lonely surfaces" in contrast to surfaces (images) being able to connect us with someone, a surface "that arouses the desire to know them and the depth to fulfill that desire.” Here's the piece: https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com/p/lonely-surfaces-on-ai-generated-images
I was anxiously awaiting your argument getting to the case of photography, and was surprised you didn't mentioned it explicitly.
Whenever I catch myself frowning at AI slop, the way you describe at the beginning of the article, I inevitably draw the analogy to the advent of photography, and Baudelaire's reaction to it (as well as many others').
Not sure photography really passes the threshold of art according to Matel's distinction. So is all photography artifice? Or do we have to water down the distinction, which inevitably opens the door for AI Slop?
You are correct that photography is probably the best recent case study, and I thought about including it as an example, but it's quite complicated I think and the essay was already getting pretty long. But I'll attempt to sketch out some of my thoughts about it here.
First, can photography be art? I think photography tends towards artifice but can certainly be art. If you simply compared someone casually snapping a landscape photo, to someone painting the same scene, the photograph certainly falls much closer to artifice most of the time. However there are still many choices that the photographer can make in the process of capturing a photograph that I think allow for the artistic process to sufficiently manifest. (You can chose a model, pose them, choose a location, time of day, direct the performance, light the scene, choose the composition, shutter speed) these things together present plenty of opportunity for the artistry of photography to present itself through the work even though it may be less laborious than producing a similar image via painting. However, photography is certainly a technology that enables the creation of much artifice, in a way that painting didn't.
So what then is the difference between photography and AI images? I'd argue that "creating" images through AI even further reduces the number of choices the human makes, and amount of control the human has, providing even less space for artistic expression to manifest itself through the work. You could argue that you can control things like pose, location, framing, etc through the prompt, but I think there's a meaningful distinction to be made between those things being the result of a process of creation (as with photography), and merely a process of description, where something else does the creation for you to achieve that result (as with AI gen). The line between these two is slimmer, and less obvious, but I think still great enough to make a distinction. And if photography is a technology where art is still possible but the technology pushes us closer to artifice by default, then AI gen is even further along that spectrum.
Your ability to formulate an argument, eloquently deconstruct it, and provide constructive feedback as to possible alternatives without taking a hard stance is so inspiring. A film analyzer/ teacher/ philosopher.
This article gave me lots to think about it. Thank you for putting this together! I agree with Marc Murison's comment here. There is something about the creative process that is so essential, the effort, the sweat, the failures, the frustrations, AI could not ever give you that experience. I am such a sceptic of AI, but I also know photographers who use it in a very beautiful way. I think I just need to spend more time thinking about it and considering the other side or the side that could benefit us all, but, so far, I have stayed away from it for the most part.
This is so well written, thank you. As a designer and artist, the difference between artifice and art is something I face everyday as I work in both realms and the differences are clear as night and day. The question is no longer can people tell the difference between AI "art" and human made art, but whether they care. As you mentioned, unfortunately most consumers do not care for the difference, they do not care for art, are hedonistic in their aims, looking for the next dopamine hit in the next most extreme image. AI images are just another frontier in consumerism, advertising masquerading as art, in the onslaught of images brainwashing consumers to consume more.
Another factor comes into play in this decline, the decline of spirituality in exchange for worship of western materialism across the world. People are no longer astonished by nature, the universe, spirit, the mysterious. Most humans now are like Narcissus, obsessed with our own image, revolving our existence around the Anthropocene. I'd argue most people have not been touched by art, thus they do not value art, poetry, and the divine. When one has not been touched by art, they will not feel called to save it. For most consumers, AI art satisfies that quick hit of dopamine, so why put in the effort to wrestle with the unfathomable nature of art?
For those who have experienced the mystery, the wonder of art, we value the human, the hand in the work, for that makes it alive, resonant not just to our minds or senses but our soul. We know the difference. There is no comparable, and we grieve AI's assault on art, we grieve our loss of connection to the beauty and the divine.
I would be content in art remaining a niche form, however it's own survival is threatened. The danger is that the increased noise in masses that do not value art is a tremendous devaluing of art, a conflation of art and artifice as the same, a suffocation of artists no longer being able to earn their livelihoods. It's a force pushing us to the capitalistic extreme, sacrificing life for artifice.
I found Thomas Flight’s “Why AI Art Feels So Wrong” insightful - and I agree that many AI-generated images can feel uncanny or hollow. But I also think framing the debate as “art vs. artifice” misses the larger story.
Art has never been defined by purity. Every era redefines what counts as “real art”: Impressionism broke classical rules, photography was dismissed as mechanical imitation, and Pop Art turned commerce into culture. Each shift expanded, rather than diminished, our idea of creativity.
What truly matters isn’t the medium but the quality, interpretation, and emotional connection an artwork creates. Meaning comes from context - how something is framed, experienced, and remembered. From Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa to Duchamp’s Fountain to today’s AI artworks, the essence of art is the same: the human drive to move, question, and connect through imagination.
When Duchamp presented Fountain - a porcelain urinal signed “R. Mutt” - he proved that art begins with choice: the decision to frame, title, and present something in a new light. The same logic applies to AI art. Behind every model, dataset, and prompt are human decisions - what to ask, what to keep, what to change, and what it means. AI may render the pixels, but the intention and curation remain human.
History is full of traditional art that felt shallow or purely commercial, so it’s natural that AI will produce both mediocrity and brilliance too. That’s not a failure of the medium; it’s just the spectrum of culture. What ultimately defines value is how authentically a work resonates and how thoughtfully it’s presented.
In the end, AI is not “just another tool,” nor is it the opposite of art - it’s a new space where human creativity, knowledge, and artistry meet technology. Every prompt, every selection, every choice in the process comes from human curiosity, memory, taste, and the need to express what words can’t.
So instead of asking whether AI is replacing art, maybe we should ask how it’s helping us rediscover what makes art alive - that deeply human spark of imagination that keeps evolving with every new medium.
Beautifully said! This gives words and structure to so many things I've been thinking about lately. Love the point about how with AI "art" you fail to experience those deeper layers of meaning the longer you engage with it. There is something profound about the process and struggle it takes to create. Definitely going to be thinking more about what our desire to create perfection through AI might say about our human nature and the effects of this.
I discovered this first on your YouTube channel. Amazing work! I'm working on an essay right now about the utilitarian approach to art, and your analysis of true art astonishing and artifice leaving no room for mystery may have stolen my thunder. Ah well, such are the perils of scrolling while drafting.
I think AI is a capitalist tool - hence the desire to remove a human from the process, because we’re expensive. The emphasis is on adopting it for business reasons, commercial reasons - not to create art. Business people don’t care about art - they just want to sell their product and make money. This is not a philosophical or emotional journey. It’s a pragmatic one.
I had an art (drawing) teacher who made me go outside and find a stick, the cruder the better. Then she said okay, now draw this flower -- incredibly delicate and complex -- using just the stick and india ink. It was impossible. That was the point. She wanted me to *create* something, not attempt to replicate a photograph. My cognitive dissonance nearly brought me to tears. In the end, though, I liked what I drew, including the long drip of ink running crookedly down the paper. It was messy and crude, yet somehow an essence of the flower came through. The process of doing, and feeling, is essential.
That experience was more than a foundational lesson, it was an epiphany. It changed how I *see*. In a million years AI could never replicate or even poorly mimic the indefinable human connection, or essence, of this drawing. As you said, it's the human process that instills art with that visceral something that we all immediately recognize and resonate with (even if we can't adequately define it).
In 1903 James Joyce defined art as "the human disposition of [...] matter for an aesthetic end", i.e. created by someone consciously manipulating materials solely to create beauty. It's a straightforward, seemingly bulletproof definition—except Joyce then defines photography (a non-human disposition of matter) and furniture (which exists for practical, not only aesthetic, ends) as not being art.
Most efforts to definitionally exclude AI from being considered "art" get tied into the same knots, a problem I feel your approach of emphasising intentionality and process helps sidestep, focusing not on a narrow technical definition but on the experience of creating and engaging with beauty. I don't agree with every point (I can accept some forms of artifice/advertising as falling under the "art" umbrella), but it echoes my own objection to AI "art"—that the pleasure of art exists in the challenge I have to do in expressing ideas beautifully or making sense of them in someone else's creation, and taking the difficulty out of it takes away the pleasure.
It's interesting to see the way AI, specially image and video generation tools, has evolved in the last 4 to 5 years. The most distinctive evolution, I think, is the transformation of AI from a tool of experimentation to a tool of mass production. If one looks to early "AI artifacts" (such as the works from Helly Herndon or previous works produced by image generation tools such as ArtBreeder or Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN)) one can see that the difference between input and output was HUGE. The machine was truly stochastic, random, esotheric and confusing. Those dimensions — of what I would describe as "machine unconcious" — were the most prominent dimensions of any AI work, making them truly baffling and eary. In other words, they seem to reflect something uncontrollable in those models. In those cases, the artist was a truly curator, I think.
Nowadays AI in general is commercialized as a tool for production. For a process that NEEDS to be standarized and not stochastic. In any case — be they words or images — the result must reflect an intention, and must resemble what ones asks for.
To think about these early examples of AI helps us, I think, to broaden our understanding of the capabilities of these tools as creative tools, and also help us articulate the dimensions that are lacking in current AI models.
These reflections also remind of a beautiful piece from L.M Sacasas that talks about AI being "lonely surfaces" in contrast to surfaces (images) being able to connect us with someone, a surface "that arouses the desire to know them and the depth to fulfill that desire.” Here's the piece: https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com/p/lonely-surfaces-on-ai-generated-images
I was anxiously awaiting your argument getting to the case of photography, and was surprised you didn't mentioned it explicitly.
Whenever I catch myself frowning at AI slop, the way you describe at the beginning of the article, I inevitably draw the analogy to the advent of photography, and Baudelaire's reaction to it (as well as many others').
Not sure photography really passes the threshold of art according to Matel's distinction. So is all photography artifice? Or do we have to water down the distinction, which inevitably opens the door for AI Slop?
You are correct that photography is probably the best recent case study, and I thought about including it as an example, but it's quite complicated I think and the essay was already getting pretty long. But I'll attempt to sketch out some of my thoughts about it here.
First, can photography be art? I think photography tends towards artifice but can certainly be art. If you simply compared someone casually snapping a landscape photo, to someone painting the same scene, the photograph certainly falls much closer to artifice most of the time. However there are still many choices that the photographer can make in the process of capturing a photograph that I think allow for the artistic process to sufficiently manifest. (You can chose a model, pose them, choose a location, time of day, direct the performance, light the scene, choose the composition, shutter speed) these things together present plenty of opportunity for the artistry of photography to present itself through the work even though it may be less laborious than producing a similar image via painting. However, photography is certainly a technology that enables the creation of much artifice, in a way that painting didn't.
So what then is the difference between photography and AI images? I'd argue that "creating" images through AI even further reduces the number of choices the human makes, and amount of control the human has, providing even less space for artistic expression to manifest itself through the work. You could argue that you can control things like pose, location, framing, etc through the prompt, but I think there's a meaningful distinction to be made between those things being the result of a process of creation (as with photography), and merely a process of description, where something else does the creation for you to achieve that result (as with AI gen). The line between these two is slimmer, and less obvious, but I think still great enough to make a distinction. And if photography is a technology where art is still possible but the technology pushes us closer to artifice by default, then AI gen is even further along that spectrum.
Your ability to formulate an argument, eloquently deconstruct it, and provide constructive feedback as to possible alternatives without taking a hard stance is so inspiring. A film analyzer/ teacher/ philosopher.
This article gave me lots to think about it. Thank you for putting this together! I agree with Marc Murison's comment here. There is something about the creative process that is so essential, the effort, the sweat, the failures, the frustrations, AI could not ever give you that experience. I am such a sceptic of AI, but I also know photographers who use it in a very beautiful way. I think I just need to spend more time thinking about it and considering the other side or the side that could benefit us all, but, so far, I have stayed away from it for the most part.
This is so well written, thank you. As a designer and artist, the difference between artifice and art is something I face everyday as I work in both realms and the differences are clear as night and day. The question is no longer can people tell the difference between AI "art" and human made art, but whether they care. As you mentioned, unfortunately most consumers do not care for the difference, they do not care for art, are hedonistic in their aims, looking for the next dopamine hit in the next most extreme image. AI images are just another frontier in consumerism, advertising masquerading as art, in the onslaught of images brainwashing consumers to consume more.
Another factor comes into play in this decline, the decline of spirituality in exchange for worship of western materialism across the world. People are no longer astonished by nature, the universe, spirit, the mysterious. Most humans now are like Narcissus, obsessed with our own image, revolving our existence around the Anthropocene. I'd argue most people have not been touched by art, thus they do not value art, poetry, and the divine. When one has not been touched by art, they will not feel called to save it. For most consumers, AI art satisfies that quick hit of dopamine, so why put in the effort to wrestle with the unfathomable nature of art?
For those who have experienced the mystery, the wonder of art, we value the human, the hand in the work, for that makes it alive, resonant not just to our minds or senses but our soul. We know the difference. There is no comparable, and we grieve AI's assault on art, we grieve our loss of connection to the beauty and the divine.
I would be content in art remaining a niche form, however it's own survival is threatened. The danger is that the increased noise in masses that do not value art is a tremendous devaluing of art, a conflation of art and artifice as the same, a suffocation of artists no longer being able to earn their livelihoods. It's a force pushing us to the capitalistic extreme, sacrificing life for artifice.
I found Thomas Flight’s “Why AI Art Feels So Wrong” insightful - and I agree that many AI-generated images can feel uncanny or hollow. But I also think framing the debate as “art vs. artifice” misses the larger story.
Art has never been defined by purity. Every era redefines what counts as “real art”: Impressionism broke classical rules, photography was dismissed as mechanical imitation, and Pop Art turned commerce into culture. Each shift expanded, rather than diminished, our idea of creativity.
What truly matters isn’t the medium but the quality, interpretation, and emotional connection an artwork creates. Meaning comes from context - how something is framed, experienced, and remembered. From Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa to Duchamp’s Fountain to today’s AI artworks, the essence of art is the same: the human drive to move, question, and connect through imagination.
When Duchamp presented Fountain - a porcelain urinal signed “R. Mutt” - he proved that art begins with choice: the decision to frame, title, and present something in a new light. The same logic applies to AI art. Behind every model, dataset, and prompt are human decisions - what to ask, what to keep, what to change, and what it means. AI may render the pixels, but the intention and curation remain human.
History is full of traditional art that felt shallow or purely commercial, so it’s natural that AI will produce both mediocrity and brilliance too. That’s not a failure of the medium; it’s just the spectrum of culture. What ultimately defines value is how authentically a work resonates and how thoughtfully it’s presented.
In the end, AI is not “just another tool,” nor is it the opposite of art - it’s a new space where human creativity, knowledge, and artistry meet technology. Every prompt, every selection, every choice in the process comes from human curiosity, memory, taste, and the need to express what words can’t.
So instead of asking whether AI is replacing art, maybe we should ask how it’s helping us rediscover what makes art alive - that deeply human spark of imagination that keeps evolving with every new medium.
Beautifully said! This gives words and structure to so many things I've been thinking about lately. Love the point about how with AI "art" you fail to experience those deeper layers of meaning the longer you engage with it. There is something profound about the process and struggle it takes to create. Definitely going to be thinking more about what our desire to create perfection through AI might say about our human nature and the effects of this.
I discovered this first on your YouTube channel. Amazing work! I'm working on an essay right now about the utilitarian approach to art, and your analysis of true art astonishing and artifice leaving no room for mystery may have stolen my thunder. Ah well, such are the perils of scrolling while drafting.
I think AI is a capitalist tool - hence the desire to remove a human from the process, because we’re expensive. The emphasis is on adopting it for business reasons, commercial reasons - not to create art. Business people don’t care about art - they just want to sell their product and make money. This is not a philosophical or emotional journey. It’s a pragmatic one.
I just watched your YouTube video today, and now you appear on my Substack feed! The algorithms are always watching. Hahaha. Great work, by the way.
A truly beautiful piece of writing. I'll be thinking about it all day :)