07/02/2026
I am seeing a LOT of criticism online about AI art - people saying it is not a genuine artform (real art), requires no imagination and involves no creativity. They also blast it (and me personally) for contributing to the problems that come with AI data centers. As a digital creator who uses AI, I would like to address these opinions.
On the "AI art isn't real art" argument:
Every major shift in artistic tools has drawn this same charge — photography was dismissed as mechanical trickery, digital art as "not real painting," synthesizers as "not real music." The tool doesn't make the choices; the artist does. Curation, prompting, iteration, and taste are still human judgment calls. A blank prompt produces nothing on its own — intention and vision are still doing the work.
On the data center / resource strain argument:
This deserves real weight — the grid and water strain on small communities from large-scale AI infrastructure is a legitimate, documented problem, not a smear. Some critics will argue this can't be separated from the art itself, the way "fast fashion" critiques don't let the garment off the hook for its supply chain. That's a fair instinct to raise, but the analogy breaks down on scale and specificity: fast fashion's harm is baked into the production of each individual item at mass volume. A single piece of AI art's marginal resource cost is a fraction of a fraction of what trains and runs the underlying model — the harm lives almost entirely upstream, in how and where infrastructure is built and regulated, not in the act of generating one image. That's why the fix is accountability for siting, energy sourcing, and utility allocation — not treating every downstream creative use as complicit in a company's infrastructure choices.