There’s an irony in being asked to write a “think piece” on artificial intelligence. Surely there’s an app for that by now: type in a few keywords; “artist,” “authenticity,” “controversy,” “social media shitstorm;” assign a word count; and hit “enter.” Out pops a serviceable slab of copy about, say, an art exhibit at a small gallery near Detroit that attempts to tangle with one of the art world’s thorniest issues, and all it needs is a light edit to correct some unwieldy grammar. I could even cook up an AI illustration for the article (well, “cook” in the way you might cook a TV dinner, I suppose.) Thinking about AI can feel like the kind of arduous but boring task best left to a machine. After decades of speculation by science fiction’s most creative minds about treacherous electronic brains, robot uprisings, and sentient androids yearning to be human, artificial intelligence turns out to be both more insidious than anything science fiction writer P. K. Dick could conjure, and also drearily banal. AI is just one of those things that’s going to happen because the people with the power to make it happen have decided it will. It’s a pernicious paradigm shift presented as a novelty item—a Spirograph that’s redrawing the geometry of society.

        A number of analogies have been floated in an attempt to help the befuddled wrap their heads around the implications of AI art. Is it the new photography—a technology so good at replicating the function of an older craft that it will prompt artists to go in radical new directions à la the early modernist painters? What new directions are there, when AI can mimic virtually any visual style? 170 years ago, Baudelaire called photography “the refuge of every would-be painter… too ill-endowed or too lazy to complete his studies.” It’s a criticism dredged up and hurled now at AI creators, mostly by professional illustrators, who previously could rely on their skill, drive, and talent to make a living.

        Another analogy: is AI art just a form of collage? Collagists have always committed the same sin that AI creators are guilty of: harvesting the talents of others to create something else. After all, someone had to design the BMW logos and carve the African sculptures that populate German artist Hannah Höch’s work. Sometimes the act of theft contributes to the power of a collage; quibbling over copyright infringement when John Heartfield appropriates Hitler’s portrait, or when the Art Workers Coalition swipes a photo of the My Lai massacre for its poster Q: And Babies? A: And Babies, would be to seriously miss the point. If there’s a distinction between handmade and AI collage, it’s in the matter of conscious intent. You can’t (yet) simply command a computer to critique American consumerism for you; you could feed keywords like “muscle man,” “vacuum cleaner,” “Al Jolson,” and “Tootsie Pop” into Midjourney and maybe get something approximating Richard Hamilton’s 1956 satirical piece Just What is It That Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing?—but where would the critique be, exactly?

        Sampling has been done both simplistically (think “Ice Ice Baby,” or “Can’t Touch This”) and brilliantly (e.g., the entirety of both De La Soul’s 3 Feet High and Rising and Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique albums), but artists who used samples back in the Wild West days of hip hop were dogged by copyright lawsuits when the use of pilfered music clips wasn’t okayed with the original publishers. Today, samples are cleared fairly routinely, and libraries exist of samples that are available for use in new songs. Graphics software giant Adobe has already implemented similar measures to regulate the use of “sampled” artworks, in an attempt to keep AI generated commercial art on the up-and-up (at least legally).

        However phony prompt-generated AI art may be, the gallery exhibit that prompted this article is real. Early in May, the Hatch Art Gallery in Hamtramck, Michigan (a 2-mile square enclave of Detroit) mounted a show called “AI and the Creator: Is it Art?” (Full disclosure: I am a founder and board member of Hatch Art.) Curated by photographer and educator Judi Bommarito, the show brings together nine artists who use various brands of generative artificial intelligence software in varying ways to make their work. Some use it to initially create sketches and form compositions from which they make traditional paintings on canvas. Others take the generated images and massage them in Photoshop or other graphics programs to fine-tune the results. In his artist statement, contributor Alan Brown emphasizes the “iterative process of poetic prompting and diligent refinement” that occurs on the “input” end of his work. None of the creators in the Hatch Art show are merely accepting whatever their computers spit out and calling it original art; rather, there is, as contributor Teri Campbell puts it, “a blend of intention and exploration” that may bring to mind the “automatism” of the Surrealists, who ostensibly allowed art to be brought forth from their subconscious minds, then intentionally refined the results afterward.

        The best of the work in the Hatch Art show—curator Bommarito’s, as it happens—is a set of snappy, moody illustrations that might make good cover art for a series of Neil Gaiman novels. William Jones’s images bring to life locations found in the 1957 edition of the Green Book, a guide published during the Jim Crow era that helped Black motorists find amenities while on the road; Jones superimposes people, cars, and maps from the era over his own photos of locations from the guide as they look today (Jones seems to use AI only to find the images he adds in). Troy Forner’s silhouette illustrations of a businesswoman walking her pet triceratops feel like eclectic stock art, but they win the viewer over with their good humor. Emily Small’s nearly monochromatic seascapes are eerie and mysterious. Kathryn Poremski’s oil painting Make Believe, a portrait of a seated girl with a rather uncanny cat on her lap, stands out for somehow preserving the strangeness of its AI-generated source material without looking overly photo-referenced. Much of the work here might be at home on the walls of a nice coffee shop, though the landscapes of Brandy VanGessel and Teri Campbell are a bit jarring somehow—preternaturally well-composed and color corrected until they resemble nature the way Crush soda tastes like oranges.

        If this seems like less than a glowing review, it’s nothing compared to the vitriol that was hurled at the show online before it was even fully conceived. An April 2 call for entries on Facebook was deluged with negative responses, ranging from wordy lectures on the nature of art and humanity, to snarky jabs (one commenter sarcastically suggested the show was an FBI sting operation set up to catch copyright thieves), to straight-up malice (“I hope your gallery loses all its artists for supporting this,” and “You are a shame brother.”) Though Hatch Art gallery director Chris Schneider has restricted access to some of the more venomous comments, many of those that remain still express either trepidation or disdain for the idea of even considering artificial intelligence to be a legitimate tool for making art.

        In any case, nothing in the Hatch Art show uses AI in any way that’s going to shift anyone’s perspective one way or the other. Meanwhile, the debate continues. Professional illustrators have resorted to some rather touchy-feely arguments to make the case that their work should be favored over AI art. Illustrator Rob Biddulph argued, in a 2023 article in the Guardian, that “true art is about the creative process much more than it’s about the final piece.” Fair enough if you ask me, but I’ll bet most commercial clients are very concerned about the “final piece,” and many will be tempted to choose the “good enough” AI-generated visual equivalent of a Big Mac—a bland sure thing—over a more personalized piece of gourmet “true art,” especially if it means keeping their budgets down. Pro artists are sounding a bit like brick-and-mortar retailers post-Amazon, relying on emotional or moral appeals for patronage now that the capitalist goalposts of “talent + hustle = success” have been shifted on them. Just as the sprawling shopping malls of old have become ghost towns, while quirky independent shops have survived by finding their niches, the commercial art that disappears in the wake of AI will be, I suspect, the stuff that’s as unremarkable and derivative as AI art is anyway.

        Myself, I’m more worried about the effect of AI on amateur artists, from young wannabes to older hobbyists, who now find themselves able to at least approximate professional art with little effort or skill. If “outsider” artists such as Aloïse Corbaz, Henry Darger, Howard Finster, Bill Traylor, or Hamtramck’s own self-taught creative Dmytro Szylak had found that puttering in AI could sufficiently give vent to whatever force was whispering into their ears, the world would have been deprived of their visionary art. That’s not to mention the untold thousands of zine makers, anime enthusiasts, Sunday painters, or other eccentrics who might not even call themselves artists but find they have some urge to express themselves, and who may indeed find the creative process to be valuable, whatever the outcome. If AI can scratch their creative itches more easily than scratching around with pencils or acrylics or electronic tablets can, they’ll miss out on the rewarding experience of making things themselves, and everyone else will miss out on their unique and highly personal creations. “Improvement makes strait roads,” said William Blake, “but the crooked roads without Improvement, are roads of Genius.”

Sean Bieri is a writer and cartoonist living in Hamtramck, a small independent enclave inside Detroit. He is a charter member of Hatch Art, which operates a gallery in what was once the city’s police station. He is currently heading up the restoration of Hamtramck Disneyland, an “outsider” artist-built environment purchased by Hatch Art following its creator’s death.