“PAINTING IS dead,” declared French painter Paul Delaroche in 1840 when the daguerreotype came into the scene—a reaction to the potential of photography to render painters obsolete, whose main niche was to capture a person’s likeness as realistically as possible.

While photography challenged traditional painting, it paved the way for future explorations of art outside realism, as seen in movements like Impressionism, Cubism, and later, Abstract Art. Artists like Norman Rockwell even integrated photographs as references for his intensely detailed paintings. 

Today, traditional painting and photography remain distinct art forms. However, artists and designers now face a new challenge: generative artificial intelligence (GenAI). Like a genie unleashed from a bottle, GenAI churns out seemingly unlimited visual content.

Expectedly, we saw big companies utilizing it, like when Coca-Cola used AI for their commercials or when Manila Bulletin placed an AI-generated illustration as a newsletter banner. From internet memes to images that resemble artists’ works, AI content has heavily saturated social media.

Digital artists, who have only recently commercialized their works, are the most affected by this change. With AI’s ability to generate images from prompts, the value of commissioned digital art may now be lower in the eyes of consumers. Concerningly, tech companies have quickly replaced video game illustrators with AI, while the more popular Disney is now planning to allow AI-generated content to appear on Disney+, in collaboration with OpenAI.

Beyond the issue of replacing artists, the concept of intellectual property is also challenged. Given that AI is trained on datasets of existing artworks, who should be credited—the user who provided the prompt, the program itself, or the artists whose works were used to train the AI?

Personally, the freedom of companies to use copyrighted works in training AI programs should be regulated to not disenfranchise artists who are already undervalued.

While AI may be faster, we, as a society, should realize that art is not only about the output, but also the process. Outsourcing the process means forgoing the creativity, critical thinking, and even the empathy involved in creating art—nuances important in an era plagued by alienation, political divide, and disinformation.

AI is undeniably a tool and therefore has the capacity to be integrated in making art without ridding the entire process or sacrificing personal curiosity to learn. However, I would still argue that artists themselves are more than capable, creative, and innovative to remain above AI.

At its core, art has always been about expression. Artistic growth coincides with one’s personal growth, the expansion of one’s view of the world, and a deeper understanding of how to become more human in many little ways that AI cannot shortcut for you.