Art vs. AI an artist’s perspective

By Ashley Witzgall

Let’s get one thing straight: we can tell.

You might think your AI-generated “art” blends in (looking at you *motions at major corporations*) that the world’s too distracted to notice the extra finger or the uncanny gloss smeared across a subject’s face – and I get it, AI art IS getting better…. But real artists can smell it. The uncanny valley doesn’t just show up visually… it’s in the energy, the texture, the intent. And intent is something no algorithm can fake (no matter how hard you try, it’s why it was so easy to call out last Christmas with Anthropologie’s holiday bags, we noticed – and we’re not letting it go).

---

Art Isn’t Just What You See

Art isn’t pixels or paint. It’s humanity made visible. It’s someone’s internal chaos translated through color, through mistakes, through all the tiny, unpolished choices that tell you a person was here. It’s our lived in human experience, our untethered emotions, our heartbreak and anxieties… it’s our irrational fears… at the risk of sounding cliche it’s a piece of our souls.

AI images? They’re mimicry. They take what we made… what we studied, sweated over, lived through… and remix it into something that looks like art but feels hollow. Like a wax museum version of creativity, or an Auguste Rodin bust (too niche? I got you boo… do the clicky thing).

And the wild part? It’s trained on our work. Scraped, stolen, and spit back out as “innovation.” That’s not creation —> that’s extraction.

---

The Myth of Efficiency

There’s this obsession now with doing everything faster. Generate ten paintings in a minute! Write a book overnight! Compose an album with a prompt!

But when did speed ever equal soul?

Artists know that part of what gives something value is the process… the time, the revision, the emotional excavation. You can’t automate heartbreak. You can’t shortcut struggle. That’s what gives art its resonance.

AI is efficient, sure. But so is a conveyor belt. That doesn’t mean it belongs in a gallery (calm your tits MoMA).

---

The Real Cost

When companies and content mills replace artists with algorithms, they’re not saving money… they’re hollowing out culture.

It’s not just jobs being lost. It’s the quiet death of experimentation. The weirdness. The perspective. The emotional fingerprints that only come from lived experience.
And maybe you’re thinking to yourselves- but Ashley, you’re being over dramatic… and maybe you’re right… but I doubt it.

Without artists, the world flattens. Everything starts to look the same because it’s all being generated from the same data slurry of stolen ideas. It’s an ouroboros of imitation… machines trained on machine output, circling endlessly until meaning disappears.

Quite frankly, Adobe should be ashamed of itself – and so should every other program running AI and stealing from artists and writers. ASHAMED (where’s the lady with the shame bell?).

---

We Can Smell It

You can always tell when something was made by a person. There’s risk in it. There’s imperfection. There’s some decision that doesn’t make sense… but works.
(It’s like this writing without an em dash – I could’ve used one, I am a millenial after all… but I chose not to. Why? Because I don’t want you to think for one f-ed up second that a chatbot wrote this – or edited it – ew.)

AI can’t take those leaps. It can only rearrange what’s already been done. That’s why AI art looks like art, but doesn’t feel like it. It’s like someone describing a dream they never had. Until AI has stayed up until the wee hours of the morning – fighting the blur in its contacts from the tears it has cried – just to finish a painting to heal its soul from a man who never deserved her in the first place (not one bit personal – I swear)… until then… it isn’t art.

So when you use AI to replace artists, know this: we can tell. We can see the seams. We can smell the algorithm in the air. And we’re not flattered… we’re furious. And we’ve told you that already so why should you care now?

Because behind every AI image is an artist’s ghost… a thousand of us, actually… scraped, copied, and nearly erased.

---

Art Is Resistance

Real art pushes back. It questions, it risks, it bleeds. It’s the opposite of automation. It’s the thing that reminds people what being human feels like.

So no, you can’t replace us. You can flood the feeds with noise, sure. You can bury us under generated content and fake style. You can recode your AI algorithmic prisoner and tell it not to get political or give us instructions on overthrowing a fuhrer… But we’ll still be here… with paint under our nails (sorry to my former nail tech, hey Jason…), with graphite smudges on our wrists, and with stories of love and loss and small moments you can’t synthesize.

And you’ll know it’s us.

Because you can smell the life in it.