If you’ve scrolled through social media in the last two years, there’s a good chance you have stumbled across art that was AI generated — some of which is so convincing, it’s difficult to tell where a person ended and a machine began.

For instance, take RossDraws, a once beloved art YouTuber who was exposed for using AI in his illustrations, losing the trust of the artistic community that once admired him. Or “Bimo,” a children’s web series, displays obvious signs of AI generation, such as limbs phasing through objects, unnatural movements like characters disappearing and reappearing out of nowhere, and emotionless text-to-speech voices.

At the heart of this AI use is an evident lack of care for the hard work and passion that goes into art of any kind.

Professor Jason Valdez, an art professor at Eastfield, said his first interaction with AI art came from his friend sharing a video with him a few years back. It was titled, “What If the Ghostbusters Movie from ’84 Had Been Written By Clive Barker.”

“It was a bunch of images and, at first, I wasn’t quite sure what I was looking at,” Valdez said. “They were paintings, and then I started to realize that they were AI generated. I thought the images themselves were interesting in terms of ‘what if’ or a piece of fan art, but I don’t know. I’m personally not a fan of the whole AI image generation deal.”

When asked what impact AI has had on his art students, he said: “I have yet to have any student that has come in insisting that they use an AI generator to complete their work. Not to say that it won’t happen in the future but, so far, I haven’t encountered it.” He added that his concern as an art educator is the temptation to rely on AI too much and “use it as a crutch.”

“I had classmates who were painters and they refused to learn traditional painting techniques. They refused to take drawing classes, they refused to take painting classes and their excuse was that they’re not a representational painter; they were not making portraits, so they didn’t need to learn how to draw.”

Valdez’s concern is that students will try and use that same excuse for using AI.

Regarding the negative effects of AI, Valdez said, “Who’s to say that some random person out there might see one of my pieces [on my website], and then basically take that information and feed it into an AI generator and create images that are very similar to mine.

“It’s definitely frightening because we want to be able to make art, but we also need to be able to make a living and sustain ourselves. From a business standpoint it’s really dangerous because this is essentially copyrighted material and anybody can use a computer program to steal it, so to speak.”

If the situation where AI takes over the industry gets dire enough, human artists may face a similar situation to musicians on Spotify, who are notoriously paid around 9/10ths of a penny for every time a user plays one of their songs.

AI also has potentially devastating effects in the animation industry. Lionsgate, a film studio, recently struck a deal with AI startup Runway to flat out replace important artist positions entirely. A representative even boasted that they can get AI to make an entire animated movie in three hours. Artists throughout the animation industry are fearing the executives’ desire to get movies and TV shows out faster for cheaper, and believe that they may be eyeing AI for such a thing. As a digital artist, I personally remember when AI images first came out and it was like a hot new toy. I hate to admit it, but I played around with it back in the early days. I’ve since grown to disdain image generators due to both the inherent lack of soul and because of the lazy AI “artists” who think it’s somehow democratizing art.

With all the industry talk of AI supposedly being a great boon for creativity, the environmental crisis fueled by data centers’ water consumption, and divisive public figures rapidly using terrible AI images of themselves for cheap social media fodder, I firmly believe that me and all my fellow artists shouldn’t give up. It may seem difficult right now, but if we keep letting the tech bros have their way, we might lose our culture and the ability to express ourselves creatively.

My advice? Keep painting. Keep sculpting. Keep animating. Because we all have something a machine doesn’t have: a soul.