The encroachment of AI tells us more than a little about just what we think of art and design.
Among certain groups, discussion of AI sounds like Oppenheimer discussing atomic energy. Perhaps the most dramatic group of all is designers and artists, who catastrophize about being replaced. The threat of outsourcing creativity to a machine that is almost infinitely faster and cheaper grows closer with every new bot launched. But as intimidating as the prospect of AI replacing human composition is, that threat has illuminated some of our closely held views on craft, art, and utility.
The Utility of AI
There are many who want to completely get rid of AI in the creative space. However, AI can be helpful to both the creator and the consumer. Design software is introducing AI tools with an increasing degree of utility. Some of the most useful of these tools help with photo rotoscoping, combining images, research, quick iteration, and creation of mock-ups. These facilitate the larger process of creating a final product that both the creator and consumer enjoy.
The limits of AI become readily apparent when generative AI is used as a one-click solution. Generative AI works by collecting a large data set, finding patterns, and mimicking the overall trends. Even though AI image generation is improving, an AI image is created by pulling from an average of data, which results in many images looking similar and lacking personality.
While AI generation is fast and cheap, it can’t replicate the individual care and strategy that real creatives exercise. For unique branding, writing, and aesthetics, AI is limited by the average of its dataset and thus can’t generate truly unique content. Even though these data sets are extremely large, generative AI inherently lacks the ability to innovate. And it can’t simulate actual intelligence: for a desired style or composition to come from the data set, a human being must craft tailored prompts. Some knowledge of the subject matter is still required to translate the design through the AI.
AI Influences Consumers’ View of Creativity
Historically, the consumer regarded creativity as a craft—a focused form of art that retains elements of beauty while serving a functional end, using skilled labor to reach a refined and strategic goal. Longer project timelines created products that lasted. Famously, Steve Jobs hired Paul Rand to create the logo for his new company, NeXT. Paul Rand didn’t provide several logo options for Jobs to choose from, but one logo and one 100-page book explaining why the one logo is Jobs’s (Jobs’?) only choice. The hard-to-please Steve Jobs was thrilled and only asked for slightly brighter colors.
Consumers' views can vary, largely based on their particular goal, which can change based on everything from affordability to fads. We see this in the trend of exporting creative projects oversees where a designer or artist can produce the work for a fraction of the price. With sites like Fiverr, this is easier now than ever before.
Similarly with AI, the consumer is prioritizing efficiency over strategic creativity. Understandably, the concerns of a business owner, manager, or buyer are larger than just the creative product. It often makes sense to save on writing, design, and art and invest those resources in other strategic areas.
But this desire for efficiency above all could result in the barriers to design and writing lowering, and therefore the thinking involved in the process diminishing as well. Ultimately, this could result in a McDonald-ification of creativity. Without a crafting hand, creativity will be filling to many consumers but really just empty calories that all taste the same.
From a viewing standpoint, we are already at a point of oversaturation with AI images, and we’re beginning to doubt ourselves. The ubiquity of AI is at a point where many don’t trust that they’re seeing, for instance, an original painting unless they view it in person. Meanwhile, composition and taste get lost in the thousands of generations. The word “slop” was Merriam-Webster’s word of the year for 2025. Many felt that this word accurately describes the meaningless media they consume through AI.
Artists’ View of AI and the Delusion of Craft
The threat AI poses feeds into a larger identity crisis within the art community. This crisis stems from a lack of a good definition of what art is, as it has become both vague and all-inclusive. Even though there is no consensus on what art is, there is a knee-jerk reaction that AI designs, writing, and products are not art. Especially in fine art, artists feel threatened but lack a clear standard for distinguishing between AI art and human art, other than who made the piece.
Technology has always been a force that evolved our understanding of art. It spurs exploration as new ways to communicate become possible, or when it changes the needs of the viewer. The camera helped grow impressionism as experimentation became more important than traditional depiction. The camera also reduced the need for historical and portrait paintings so much that those crafts are almost extinct compared to how commonplace they once were.
Amidst these other technological innovations, AI is a particular threat to craft. As barriers to creation are lowered, the understanding of what constitutes creativity is also lost. It’s great to have a calculator to quickly add, subtract, multiply, and divide, but if you start losing the basic understanding of what you are adding and why, the ease the calculator provides actually hinders your knowledge.
Combined with the commercial desire for cheaper and faster creativity at the expense of experimentation and study, this easier way to create could lead to a degradation of craft. The artists and the viewer would both be left with uninspired noise. This threat to craft is more of what should be fought than AI in its entirety.
The Three Choices Creators Face
With growth in AI’s ability to depict, creators have three choices: adopt AI’s ability to produce wholesale; become more experimental, like the fine artists; or focus more on craft.
Adopt
Some are embracing AI with open arms, like Coca-Cola and Activision, who are using AI for asset creation in Black Ops 7. Their efforts to integrate AI have come with mixed results. Some people say the game assets and shots from the commercials look uncanny and lack any coherency, while others are optimistic about future improvements.
Others have found more success, such as Magdiel Lopez, an artist who uses AI to experiment with conceptual designs in Photoshop and enhance his craft. Lopez can develop conceptual work at a faster rate by using AI to add abstract elements or detail to his work. His use of AI is limited and very controlled, but it drastically shortens the amount of time it would take to create these effects. In this setting, AI serves as a tool in the hand of the craftsman.
Experiment
One benefit of AI, just like the overseas designer who can make designs cheaper, is that it will increase competition. Creatives will have to compete to make better, more experimental work to differentiate it from AI, which might mean that we all get to see better material.
As AI progresses, human compositions may become more unorthodox in response. Adobe hired the aforementioned Magdiel Lopez and incorporated his very distinctive illustration in the Adobe Photoshop launch screen. Other artists are experimenting by physically making marks, handwriting typography, and creating a rougher look in their compositions. This imperfect feel is a direct response to the “perfections” AI creates by taking the average of its thousands of source images.
Tell the Story of Craft
Another, and perhaps the best, way to differentiate true art from all the noise AI produces is to tell the story of the craftsmanship that went into a project. Already, brands are focusing on highlighting craft, like Apple, which used practical effects to create the AppleTV title sequence. Apple then released a campaign to explain the laborious steps taken in creating the sequence. The end result could have been accomplished through digital effects and probably for less money. But the story of the project meant more to people than the result. Even if it’s cheaper and faster, perhaps we really don’t want robots taking over art after all.
