You ask AI to put together an image that includes dolphins, space, and cats. The AI generates an image in 2 seconds. You put that onto a website and call it your “art” because you generated it and thought of the idea for it, even though the AI did all of the work. 

AI has recently become a popular platform, yielding helpful as well as hurtful qualities. Some helpful qualities include idea generators for projects, providing deep amounts of learning and time-saving summaries of information. However, some hurtful qualities include, generating content such as photos and videos that can be passed off as the truth and misinform people, creating essays, and answers to school work, and creating artwork that people can pass off as their own and make a profit off of. 

This is a huge issue because many people who make art as a hobby, or for a profit, take hours, and even days to perfect their craft, and truly earn their wages. However, AI “artists” type in a prompt and get an image seconds later putting in zero time and effort. 

Art has now become a skill that anyone can possess, not only the talented, or people that have worked for years to become proficient at the skill. Art would lose its exclusivity, and while that may seem like a good thing, for artists who need to live off of the wages they make, the value of art would significantly decrease. With so many art pieces entering the market and all, indistinguishable from the real thing, people who produce more would be able to charge less per artwork, creating a new standard for art buying. 

AI “artists” also remove the necessity to learn skills that previously took years to master, and can now be “mastered” through the use of AI and creating realistic artwork. Learning graphic design, and mastering the art of applications like Adobe Illustrator, or Adobe Photoshop, is no longer necessary.

The Art of Individuality with art, and graphic design will also fade away. If art is exclusively made with AI, there would be no variations or very little variations between different AI applications. This would surely be a bleak existence for art enjoyers, as the beautiful individuality that can accompanywith art, and style has faded away. 

Some may think that AI artists enable people who previously had no access to artistic tools or ways to invest in learning talent to finally explore new passions. Though this may be true, many people who do have access to these tools and could invest in their curiosity choose to use AI as it is the easiest and cheapest way to do so, unfortunately outweighing those with good intent. 

Overall, AI artists should not be considered artists, as they take valuable income sources for people who depend on producing art to make a living, as well as harm creativity and make access to truthful, amazing art less and less. AI artists are not artists because they rely on ease, and swiftness to create art, which is the opposite of creating true, authentic art at the end of the day.