From being the source of many internet memes to shedding light on political and social issues, artificial intelligence (AI) art has rapidly gained attention these past few years. In addition to its ability to mock almost any art style, it has also raised concerns over its ability to preserve the humanity and soul of art before the age of AI.

AI art is commonly defined as any form of art that has been created or edited with AI tools, applicable to visual art, music, theater, and other art forms. Though it can represent decades of hard work, research, testing, and, ironically, creative thinking, and hence leading to the creation of a rapidly-evolving machine, AI art simultaneously represents the spiralling desire nowadays for “speed, cost-efficiency, and mass production over originality or depth”, as stated in an interview with 17-year-old high school student Joanne Wang who finds using ChatGPT helpful for catering personalized feedback yet admits the diminishing of critical thinking skills that sometimes result afterwards.

In other words, AI art can  be considered a consequence of wanting to maximize the benefit that’s art, while minimizing cost which is time and effort. In this case, is the art made by AI really authentic? 

Publicly-accessible platforms such as MidJourney, DALL-E, and even TikTok’s filter generator have also allowed people to feed a chatbot a prompt which then can be transformed into an image within seconds. Users can then refine the image by asking the machine to change it, leading to a vicious cycle of warning more while sacrificing less, despite requiring extremely high amounts of computational power, decreasing intellectual curiosity, and weakening research abilities. In an interview with 17-year-old high school student Iris Chong , she said, “AI art is easy to make, because it’s just a prompt and a visually pleasing piece made within a minute. It’s much easier to gain subscribers too, especially with minimal effort.” In addition, using AI to create art can drive unnecessary excessive consumerism fueled by the trending preferences or styles of mass media, as Iris states, “They [AI art creators] also get to profit off of it such as selling those designs on a shirt.”

Impact on the faith in AI and human-made art

In a study of public perception of generative AI on Twitter based on occupation and usage, it was found that the general sentiment towards generative AI has been mostly positive across various occupations, which is positively correlated with their exposure to AI. Yet, despite the negative consequences of AI art in everyday life, sentiments surrounding the practice remain mixed. High school student Yejun Kim responded with a mixed, but hopeful and resilient attitude, stating that, “Despite AI’s potential to reach and even surpass humans’ creativity and skill on art, man-made art is and has been engraved in our culture for thousands, if not millions, of years.” 

Wang, on the other hand, presents a more sceptical view, shedding light on negative implications when she said, “I feel like this has heightened my interest in AI as a general issue as it shows the creative potential of AI, and also its disruptive presence in how society views and values originality and creativity as AI does not truly ‘create’ art. I think that man-made art will definitely suffer a severe blow from the rise of AI-art as less artists are able to make a living, resulting in less artists and less creation. It will be difficult for the art field to truly prosper when creators dwindle.”

Resistance against AI art

However, despite more people relying on feeding chatbots such as Midjourney to generate AI art, users (including artists) have also found ways to protest this online. By teaching inexperienced artists how to differentiate AI from human-made art, publicly exposing digital art made by AI, and spreading awareness of this issue across social media in general, viewers have adopted an increasingly critical and careful mindset of liking art posts online. 

Yet, while protests continue to resist the downfall of imperfect yet authentic imagination in the creative field, they represent something deeper–the struggle between our desire to preserve humanity and our need to advance technology that is evolving faster than our AI ethics can keep up.

But perhaps the real question is not who will win the race between automation and artistry, but rather how humanity can redefine true creativity in an era of algorithms. Eventually, the main goal will be to leave our human fingerprint in the codes that shape the art of tomorrow. 

This article was written for the Yale Daily News’ 2025 Summer Journalism Program for high school students.