01/19/2026
I saw someone say that AI artists are the flat earthers of the art community. Honestly, that might be the dumbest take I have ever seen.
Flat earthers cling to old, outdated beliefs and refuse to accept science and new technology. That is actually a better description of the people who insist AI art “isn’t real art” than it is of the people using AI.
Let me say this up front: I have enormous respect for traditional artists.
People who draw, paint, sculpt, carve, weld, break glass, work in unusual mediums, all of it. It is hard. It takes years. I never had the patience to sit and draw, but I have spent 16 to 20 hours at a stretch building digital pieces in Photoshop. Traditional craft is beautiful and I respect anyone who does it.
But we also live in a world where speed, efficiency, and cost matter. That is why we went from painters to photography, from film to digital, from darkroom retouchers to Photoshop, and now from “do everything by hand” to “work with AI.” Every big jump in technology made things faster, cheaper, and more efficient. AI is just the next step.
In the future there will be two kinds of artists:
• Artists who work with AI and have jobs.
• Artists who refuse to work with AI and either fade into irrelevance, or survive only if they can build a strong, loyal following in a specific niche that fully supports them and their craft.
So artists really have three choices:
A) Put ego and self importance aside, pick up the new tools, and use them to amplify their talent, speed, creativity, and output. Take the years of art experience they already have and rocket to the front of the pack.
B) Dig in, refuse to adapt, let ego and stubbornness run the show, and slowly watch all their hard earned experience become irrelevant.
C) Stay fully traditional, refuse to work with AI, and work their ass off to build a loyal following of collectors and supporters who are willing to fund their traditional art. That path is possible, but it is not an easy thing to do. It takes time, consistency, marketing, and treating their art like a serious business.
And before some genius jumps in with “you are not even an artist,” let me help you out.
I was a singer in a professional band between the ages of 8 and 12.
I worked as a web designer for about 5 years.
I have been a photographer, retoucher, and compositor for about 15 years.
I have also written three books years ago the hard way, before AI tools like this existed.
Now I use everything I learned from all of that to create AI art, photos, videos, and music.
On top of that, I have added an entirely new skill set: prompt crafting and AI direction. Learning how to talk to each model, how to structure prompts, how to guide style, lighting, composition, emotion, wardrobe, and environment so I get exactly what I want is its own art form. Every model has its quirks. You have to experiment, iterate, refine, and push it until it finally matches the picture in your head. That is not “click a button.” That is creative problem solving and artistic direction.
What I actually do now looks a lot like being an art director.
I decide the wardrobe, the setting, the mood, the style, the type of model. I tell the AI what I want. Then I use the same culling skills I learned as a photographer to sort hundreds of images and pick the best ones. After that I refine them with more AI, with Photoshop, or with both. A lot of the time I am compositing multiple AI images together by hand.
If I want video, I direct AI to animate the image. That means more prompting, more trial and error, more choices. I do more creative work now than I did when I was running around with lights, booking models, signing releases, and dealing with agencies. The difference is that my crew is digital.
There is also a big blind spot in the “AI is not art” crowd.
Leonardo da Vinci had students and assistants painting huge parts of his pieces. Modern studio artists do the same thing and have teams who execute the work that still gets signed with one name. Nobody screams “that is not real art.”
Movie directors are considered artists. They are not doing the acting.
Cinematographers are artists. They frame and capture the images, yet they are not the ones on screen.
Production designers and set designers are artists. They are not the ones filming or acting either.
Editors are artists. They are not in front of the camera or behind it on set. They “only” cut the film together, shape the timing, rhythm, and emotion, and turn raw footage into a story.
Smart artists embrace new tools. They do not fight them. They know it is not the tools you use that determine whether you are an artist. It is how you use them that determines whether you are an artist or not.
Yet when an artist uses AI as part of the process and directs it to execute their vision, suddenly “that is not real art” and “you are not an artist.” It is a completely ridiculous double standard. You cannot call all those roles artistic and then pretend the person directing AI is not an artist. The logic does not hold up.
We have seen this exact situation play out in history before:
Painters said photography “wasn’t real art.”
Film photographers said digital “wasn’t real photography.”
Airbrush retouchers said Photoshop “wasn’t real retouching.”
We also saw the same thing happen with computers.
Early coders and command line users said graphical user interfaces were toys and not serious tools. They were afraid that if computers became easy for everyone to use, they would lose their status as the only people who could “talk” to the machine. They tried to gatekeep access and keep that power to themselves, much like some traditional artists are trying to do now with their anti AI views.
We also saw it, once again, with writers. They went from writing by hand to typewriters, then from typewriters to word processors. People complained that if you used a computer, you were not really writing, you were just letting the machine do it. Now we are at the point where I am literally dictating this into an AI assistant, telling it what I want to say, what to rearrange, and what to clean up, so I can do this in 45 minutes instead of three hours. The ideas and structure are still mine. The tool just helps me move faster.
Every single time, the new technology won. AI will be no different.
