At a 2024 auction, a portrait of Alan Turing was sold for $1.08 million USD. Although a compelling painting, it was created by the artificial intelligence (AI) robo-artist Ai-Da, built in 2019. Now the most valuable AI-generated artwork ever sold, the piece represents what most artists have been fearing: The invasion of AI in artistic spaces.
This invasion isn’t strictly within the visual arts, though: In November 2025, How Was I Supposed to Know? reached Billboard’s Adult R&B Airplay. The song was number 30 on the chart. Xania Monet wrote this song; she’s an AI-generated musician who creates AI-generated music.
Generative AI (GenAI) has been increasingly used to create or enhance art. Many are questioning the integrity of non-human-generated art, the value of the ‘art’ Gen AI produces, and how far it will go.
As AI attempts a mimicry of human creativity, the already heavy competition in the art industry has been amplified. Many GenAI image generators exist on the market. DALL·E, now DALL·E 3, was created by OpenAI in 2022, its name ironically inspired by the 2008 film, WALL-E, and impressionist painter Salvador Dali. To test the generator’s knowledge on artistic styles, Jamena McInteer, a full stack developer and UI/UX designer, tried entering different prompts ranging from landscapes to llamas, abstract to photorealism, and oil paint to gouache. McInteer determined DALL·E was successful in creating alluring images that resembled human art, but found the generator’s limits in the sometimes uncanny or inaccurate results. Despite these inaccuracies, DALL·E’s mimicry can produce a broad range of what a user might desire. If it can be thought of, it can be generated, and the quality of these creations is only improving with time.
Many artists have criticized the introduction of AI into artistic spaces. Kenneah March Dimacali, who was selected as a runner-up for the Michèle Whitecliffe Art Writing Prize under the theme ‘Artificial intelligence (AI) and the visual arts,’ wrote in her essay that art is meant to be difficult. It’s not the art itself that is the prize, but the time and effort that it took to make the piece. GenAI ‘art’ is not art because it eliminates the difficulty of the artistic process.
Fortunately, in a push-back, there’s been a rise in appreciation for human-made art. Another study conducted by C. Blaine Horton Jr., Sheena S. Iyenga, and Michael W. White made clear that human-made art is valued over AI art because of the substance and feeling behind it. It takes months or years for artists to create one meaningful piece. AI, however, only takes a couple of seconds to generate something. And, while its quality is adjustable through the viewer’s typed prompts, there is no sentient feeling behind its creation. Art stems from its human artists and is shared with viewers to produce feeling, whereas AI ‘art’ is created solely for a consumer who found an easy way to get an image.
With products labelled as “human-made,” an anti-AI movement has begun. Past the plastic arts, the book and film industry has joined this movement. Published last year, the horror novel Shy Girl gained positive public traction from readers and critics until it was suspected that 78 per cent of the book was AI-generated. The book’s publisher, Hachette, cancelled its production. Heretic’s producers added an “anti-credit” of GenAI at the end of the film.
Co-existing in the artistic sphere with AI is becoming inevitable, but there is a significant problem with GenAI developing too fast for regulation to keep up. Artists’ careers are at risk of being compromised. Human creativity and intelligence have decreased. With the abuse of GenAI, artistic creativity and humanity as a whole are threatened. Art is so existentially human; we need it not to survive, but to live. From the first cave paintings found in Altamira to Jeff Koons’ balloon animal sculptures, art’s purest form comes from the human hand at its centre. Even as AI hones its perfect copy, art will never flourish through mere mimicry.