There's much ado about the future of art, and it's something I contemplate every week, if not daily now. Where is my place in this new frontier? Will there still be use for my mind, for my hands, when everyone has magic at their fingertips?
I have more thoughts which I'll save for later, but one thing that came to me in a series of revelations is this:
Art has always been a game of prompts and iterations. It is your conversation with yourself. It is our conversation with each other.
Before ChatGPT, before digital filters, before Photoshop, artists were taking inputs from the world, processing them through their unique sensibilities, and producing outputs that built upon what came before.
All of our art - music, painting, architecture, is a centuries-long game of call and response. And there will always be art so long as we hide messages in media and so long as people are patient enough to seek out those messages.
Art has always eaten itself.
An artist called Doechii dropped a hit called “Anxiety” in 2025, which reworked chord progressions from Gotye’s 2011 hit “Somebody That I Used to Know,” which itself borrowed its distinctive riff from Luiz Bonfá’s 1962 bossa nova classic “Samba de Orfeu.”
Weird Al’s “Amish Paradise” (1996) parodied Coolio’s “Gangster’s Paradise” (1995), which sampled Stevie Wonder’s “Pastime Paradise” (1976).
When you look at the art itself, putting aside the contract law of music licensing, you aren’t seeing theft. It’s the circular nature of creativity.
You recognise this pattern in fashion taste, too. What you mock in your father’s wardrobe, you’ll eventually celebrate as “vintage” in your grandfather’s.
Very little is completely original. Or perhaps it’s better to say that creativity lives in the process rather than the creation. Art is the journey, not the destination.
What has changed throughout history isn’t this basic pattern inspiration iteration. What’s changed is the speed and accessibility of the tools we use to create.Artists once spent years mastering colour theory and working within the constraints of available pigments. Then came fast-drying paints, reducing portrait work from months to days. Photography compressed the timeline further. Digital editing tools eliminated the darkroom. Today, a smartphone and a few apps can produce in minutes what once required specialised training and equipment.
The wheels of creation have been iteratively greased.
Each technological shift has brought handwringing about the death of art. Yet art persists, because it doesn’t live in the tools – it’s a transmission of knowledge and emotion from one mind to another.
When I write, when I paint, when I take a photo, I am not just creating an artifact, I’m instantiating a feeling - a slice of life and meaning that I want to communicate to someone else. I do this with editing, with cropping, and in AI work, with prompting.
I recently experimented with AI-generated images based on my own artistic style. I uploaded examples of my digital art, described my inspirations, shared my favourite colour palettes. Then I iterated - dozens of versions, adjusting prompts, refining compositions.
The resulting images felt like my work. They carried my aesthetic sensibilities. The difference was time: 20 minutes of iteration instead of an afternoon. But the creative decisions - the taste, the direction, the soul of the thing - those were mine.
Turns out AI art is only slop when you treat it like slop. When you treat it like art, cool things emerge.
Here I generated a jumping man in four different art styles - I’ll share my drawings with you another time:
Here’s the key distinction:
Generative AI isn’t art by default.
Typing words into a prompt bar isn’t art for the same reason that pressing a camera shutter isn’t automatically great photography, making a beat in Logic Pro isn’t automatically great music, and writing words in Google Docs isn’t automatically great literature.
Using the medium isn’t enough. Getting an output isn’t enough. Even a “good-looking” output isn’t enough.Art happens when you bring yourself to bear; when your thoughts manifest, when energy and sensation transmit from your consciousness to your audience. When something of your humanity reaches through the medium to touch another’s humanity.
This can happen regardless of the tools you use.
A part of me fears this AI revolution. I look at the years I spent honing my street photography skills and wonder if they’ll be rendered obsolete when an 11-year-old can create similar images from her bedroom. But another part recognises there’s tremendous creative potential on the other side of this technological shift.
My ability to survive this transition will depend not on the tools I use, but on the depth of my taste and the vividness of my thought. Transcendent work will come from those who open their minds wide enough to push beyond what’s easily generated.
I used to be “good” because I played near the edge of old boundaries. If I remain there, my work will soon seem middling. The frontier has moved. The question isn’t whether AI can make art. It’s whether I can still make art that matters.
The boundaries are shifting again. I can’t wait to see what comes next.
