Let me say this plainly before I say anything else: if you’re an artist who is angry, anxious, or grieving about AI, I’m not here to tell you you’re wrong.
This is one of the most charged conversations in the creative world right now, and it deserves better than the two camps it usually collapses into: the techno-optimists who wave away every concern, and the purists who treat anyone who touches the tools as a traitor. I don’t belong to either. I build AI products for a living, and I still think the artists raising the alarm are pointing at something real.
So this is my attempt at two sides of the same coin, written with respect, not a case against anyone.
I’ve lived on both sides of this
I’m not coming to this as an outsider lobbing opinions at a world I’ve never been part of. Long before I built AI products, I built things by hand. In university I fell into graphic and web design, and I spent years working for the Wilfrid Laurier University athletics department, laurierathletics.com. I designed the programs, the guides, the advertisements; I was part of branding exercises and built well over a hundred pieces. I learned QuarkXPress, then InDesign back at version 1.0, plus Photoshop and Illustrator when each new layer of craft was its own mountain to climb. I know what the toil feels like, because I was the one in the athletics center long after midnight getting the work done.
So when I say I take the “where’s the toil?” objection seriously, I mean it from the inside. I’ve bled for the kerning.
But here’s the other half of that lived experience, and it’s the part that changed how I think. I’d pour hours into a piece I believed in, hand it over, and hear: “Just make it look like this.” I’d disagree. I was the craftsman; surely I knew best. And often, more often than my younger self wanted to admit, they were right. Not because they had better taste, but because art that’s made for an audience eventually has to answer to that audience. I’ve spent enough years in marketing since to say it bluntly to clients now: “I don’t care whether you like the purple. I care whether the customer does.”
That tension – the artist’s expression on one side and the people it’s actually for on the other – sits underneath this entire AI conversation. Hold onto it; I’ll come back to it.
Where the resistance is coming from
A couple of years ago, the backlash was a trickle. Today it’s a movement. Over 200 musicians, including Billie Eilish, Stevie Wonder, Nicki Minaj, and Jon Bon Jovi, signed an open letter warning against the “predatory use of AI.” More than 11,500 creatives, including Julianne Moore, Thom Yorke, and ABBA’s Bjorn Ulvaeus, signed another. Over 15,000 writers, among them Margaret Atwood, Suzanne Collins, and Dan Brown, demanded consent and compensation. The Procreate CEO put it bluntly: “Creativity is made, not generated.”
When I actually listen, the objections sort into a few buckets:
- “Where’s the toil?” Art is supposed to cost something: time, struggle, craft. AI skips the toil, and that feels like cheating.
- “It’s built on our backs.” The models were trained on millions of works, scraped without permission, and the people who made that work see none of the upside.
- “It’s drowning us out.” On Deezer, roughly 18% of new uploads – about 20,000 songs a day – are now fully AI-generated. One AI “band,” The Velvet Sundown, pulled 1.2 million monthly listeners before most people knew it wasn’t real. Every one of those streams is a royalty a working musician didn’t earn.
- “It devalues what we do.” If a machine can produce a poem or a painting in seconds, what happens to the meaning of making one?
I want to take these seriously, because some of them I can answer, and one of them I can’t.
The two I’ll push back on (gently)
The first is the toil. I understand the instinct; there should be struggle in art. But “this used to take longer” has never, on its own, been an argument against a tool.
Think about how writing itself has changed. For most of human history, every word was scratched by hand, slowly, with no way to fix a mistake except to start over. Then Gutenberg’s press came along and the priests and scholars who had spent their lives copying manuscripts by hand cried that something sacred had been lost. Then came the typewriter: faster than handwriting, though your hands paid for it differently. Then the dedicated word processor, a machine with a small screen and floppy disks and the prayer that you’d saved before the power went out. Then the personal computer, with WordPerfect glowing on a blue screen. Then, today, I can speak a sentence and it appears on a page.
I lived that arc myself, paper to word processor, literally. Each transition felt like cheating to someone. None of them killed writing. Every single one changed who could write, how much they could write, and how fast – and the writing that mattered still required a human being with something to say.
Photography, in 1839, was supposed to be the death of painting. Instead it took over the burden of pure realism and freed painters to invent Impressionism, abstraction, everything that followed. The demand for hand-painted portraits collapsed. The art form exploded. Speed changed the business of art. It did not end it.
The second objection, “it’s just derivative; it has no original thoughts,” I find harder to grant, because that description fits almost all of us. Picasso said it best: “Good artists copy; great artists steal.” Manet’s most celebrated work was built on a Renaissance print. George Lucas stitched Star Wars together from Kurosawa films and Joseph Campbell. Every novelist who read Agatha Christie before writing a mystery is standing on someone’s shoulders. We are all remixing our influences. AI does the same thing, just at a scale that is at once enormous and granular: not three influences but three thousand, blended at once. That’s a difference of degree and speed, not a difference in kind.
The one I won’t wave away
Here’s where I have to set the analogies aside and be straight with you: the consent-and-compensation objection is real, and nothing I’ve said above dissolves it.
The typewriter didn’t get built by copying a million specific writers’ private notebooks without asking. Photography didn’t require ingesting Monet’s catalog to function. Generative AI does something genuinely new: it learns from the actual, identifiable work of living creators, and so far almost none of that value flows back to them. You can believe AI is a profound creative tool and believe that the people whose life’s work trained it deserve a say and a share. I do believe both. “All art is derivative” explains how influence works between humans; it is not a license for a trillion-dollar industry to skip the part where you ask. That’s not a Luddite complaint. It’s a fairness complaint, and it deserves real answers like licensing, opt-outs, and compensation, not a shrug.
The human holding the brush was always the point.
The part everyone underweights: the human layer
Strip all that away and here’s what I keep coming back to. AI can produce an image, and it’s usually a fine image, not a great one. It can write a poem, and it’s a passable poem, not one that breaks your heart. What’s missing is the human layer. The judgment. The taste. The lived thing you’re actually trying to say.
I’ll be honest about how this very article was made, because it proves the point. These are not the machine’s thoughts. They’re mine, shaped by a conversation I had this week, articles I read, people I argued with. I spent time sharing those ideas, that research, those half-formed arguments with AI, and it helped frame a first draft in a fraction of the time it would’ve taken me on my own. Then I went back through it: where are the subtleties only I would add? Where did it flatten what I actually meant? That second pass is the art. The AI didn’t replace me. It was an amplifier and an accelerant. It helped me do what I already did, faster, so I could spend my energy on the part that’s actually human.
Each new layer of craft was its own mountain to climb. That was true with InDesign. It was true with word processors. It’s still true with AI. The mountain is just a different shape now: less about learning the software, more about knowing what you’re trying to say well enough to recognize when the tool got it right. That discernment, that final judgment – that’s the human paintbrush.
And this is where that tension from my Laurier days comes back. Art isn’t meant to live in a hole. It’s made to be seen, heard, read, consumed. The expression of the artist is critical; it’s the whole reason any of it matters. But it was never the only thing in the room. There’s always been someone on the other side saying “this moves me” or “this doesn’t,” and that conversation between maker and audience is part of what art is. AI doesn’t erase that conversation. If anything it lowers the cost of having it. More drafts, more directions, more chances to find the thing that actually lands – as long as a human is still the one deciding what’s worth keeping.
An invitation, not an ultimatum
So this is my challenge to the artists and creatives who are tempted to wall it off entirely: don’t block it out; investigate it. And not so you can produce more, faster, for more money. That’s the boring version. The interesting question is what the time buys back.
Could you write the better novel because you now carry the influence of not three books but three thousand? Could you skip the grind of research and spend that reclaimed week on the work only you can do? Could the tool handle the parts you never loved, so you have more room for the parts you do?
Maybe your answer is still no, and I mean it when I say I respect that. Everyone sits somewhere different on this spectrum, and I’m not here to drag anyone to my end of it. I won’t tell you you’re wrong for keeping AI at arm’s length. I’d only ask the same in return.
Two sides of the same coin. A tool, not an enemy. And underneath all of it, the conviction that the human holding the brush was always the point.
