Why Art Won't Die

Figure 1 - Benita, hand in pocket by Awanle Ayiboro Hawa Ali (2024). Oil on canvas painting that makes up part of her solo exhibition, Fine Feathers Don't Make Fine Birds

It is said that upon first seeing a photograph in 1839, French painter Paul Delaroche exclaimed “From today, painting is dead!” (Barnes, 2019), believing that photography's ability to perfectly capture any scene the human eye could see would render the medium of painting useless. It could also be said that Awanle Ayiboro Hawa Ali, a Ghanaian painter and visual artist whose first solo painting exhibition “Fine Feathers Don’t Make Fine Birds” recently opened at Gallery 1957 (Gallery 1957, 2025), may disagree with that statement. While it is true that the invention of photography meant that a number of uses for painting (such as recording history or creating portraits (Barnes, 2019)) now had a more efficient competitor, it by no means meant that paintings stopped serving these uses, or that painting as a medium disappeared at all.

Figure 2 - Career Day I by Awanle Ayiboro Hawa Ali (2023). Oil on canvas painting that makes up part of her personal exhibition, The Abandoned Playground

A notable change is that during the 20th century, paintings became a medium through which less realistic movements like surrealism, modernism, and expressionism thrived, as painting began to "move beyond literal depictions of nature" (Tate, 2025) and explore more internal emotional states that photographs couldn’t capture. However, this change in focus did not destroy the medium as a whole.

All this aims to serve my point that despite the rise of “AI art”, human-made art is not going anywhere, despite some disagreement. One person championing the use of “AI art” is Jason Allen who won first place at the Colorado State Fair’s digital art competition. His entry, Théâtre D’opéra Spatial, was the result of typing prompts into the AI programme Midjourney, choosing his favourite from over 900 renders and tweaking the design in Photoshop (Kuta, 2022). The piece has brought up a lot of questions about the nature of art and human involvement. Obviously, Allen’s Photoshop altering of the design points to some technical skill and artistic intention as he thought about the mood he wanted to create, but the fact that he had over 900 ready-made options to choose from makes it feel as though his involvement was limited to small adjustments, rather than incorporating an authentic artistic vision. After winning first place, he confidently proclaimed “Art is dead, dude” and “It’s over. AI won. Humans lost.” (Roose, 2022), understandable infuriating many other artists.

Figure 3 - Théâtre D’opéra Spatial by Jason Allen (2022)

It is this harsh tone that I want to focus on when it comes to discussing “AI art”. The idea that humans have “lost” against AI suggests that art is a competition, and that the ultimate goal that all artists strive towards is being able to create as much work as possible with as little effort and input. This is certainly the stance taken by proponents of “AI art”, as the common argument in favour of it is that companies will prefer AI generated work that can be produced quickly and cheaply over work produced with human thought and intention. However, while it is completely accurate to assert that companies will generally race to the cheapest method of doing something, I feel that it completely misunderstands the point of art to claim that art is defined by the whims of profit-motivated companies. It is in bad faith to claim that “efficiency” is the only metric by which art should be judged.

Figure 4 - Stack 9, Copper Blue by Annie Morris (2018)

A major angle that many proponents of “AI art” seem to miss is that the process of creation is as much the point as the finished product. Artist Annie Morris is well known for her “Stack” sculptures - on the surface, they are bronze cast irregular lumps covered in bright raw pigment paints and stacked atop each other (Timothy Taylor, 2024). Upon further investigation, these “irregular lumps” are inspired by the form of Morris’ body while pregnant, and the first of these Stacks were created during an intense period of grief following the stillbirth of her first child (Christie's, 2024). The role that the process of creating these works played as a way of expressing, coming to terms with and, eventually, living with the grief of a tragic situation cannot be understated. To suggest that an AI could physically recreate a similar outcome is to miss the entire emotional underpinning and intention of the work, and to suggest that art is nothing more than the physical form you see before you.

Another shortfall in the championing of “AI art” is to ignore the fact that all AI programmes are trained on existing images and texts (mostly without the consent of the creator). In fact, artificial “intelligence” is a misnomer - the programme cannot think or create anything unique, it can only merge together existing pieces of art to create something resembling an original approach. There is no intelligence or artistic consideration involved in the process, and the quality of the outcomes rely heavily on the quality of the art being fed into the programme to begin with.

Figure 5 - Artist Annie Morris posed amongst sections of her Stack scupltures, which represent the grief she experienced following a miscarriage, and are inspired by the form of her pregnant stomach.

In fact, a recent article in Nature discovered that using AI generated content to train AIs further led to “irreversible defects” in the outputs, and maintained that human-made art will remain “increasingly valuable” for training AI programmes and maintaining quality outputs (Shumailov et al., 2024). If it’s true that “humans lost” against AI, then it seems that AI will quickly follow suit as it deteriorates based on its own output.

In short, it is false to assert that “AI art” is in any way self-sustaining, or particularly creative, since it involves commanding a programme to merge together existing art to create something that mimics an original approach. The tendency to focus on art only as a final outcome also speaks to a lack of curiosity and lack of desire to engage with the process of creation, ignoring one of the major forces that push people to create. In short, art is far from dead, dude.

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Figure 6 - The album cover for Brainless God (2013) by Direct Hit!

This post's thumbnail was inspired by Direct Hit!'s Brainless God (2013) album cover, as the album explores the importance of humanity and connection, even in situations as dire as the end of the world. Both Brainless God (2013) and the existence of "AI Art" suggest that giving up would be easy, but that persevering regardless is what makes us human.

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Sources:

Barnes Foundation. (2019, February 24). From Today, Painting Is Dead: Early Photography in Britain and France. https://www.barnesfoundation.org/whats-on/early-photography

Gallery 1957. (2025, February 13). Awanle Ayiboro Hawa Ali - Fine Feathers Don't Make Fine Birds. https://www.gallery1957.com/exhibitions/123-awanle-ayiboro-hawa-ali-fine-feathers-dont-make-fine-birds-gallery-i-accra/

Kuta, S. (2022, September 6). Art Made With Artificial Intelligence Wins at State Fair. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/artificial-intelligence-art-wins-colorado-state-fair-180980703/

Roose, K. (2022, September 2). An A.I.-Generated Picture Won an Art Prize. Artists Aren't Happy. New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/02/technology/ai-artificial-intelligence-artists.html

Tate. (2025). Expressionism. https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/e/expressionism

Timothy Taylor. (2024). Annie Morris. https://www.timothytaylor.com/artists/annie-morris/

Christie's (2024, March 9). Annie Morris (B. 1978). https://www.christies.com/en/lot/lot-6470165

Shumailov, I., Shumaylov, Z., Zhao, Y., Papernot, N., Anderson, R., Gal, Y. (2024). AI models collapse when trained on recursively generated data. Nature 631, 755–759. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-07566-y

Figures:

Figure 1 - Artsy. (2025). Awanle Ayiboro Hawa Ali. https://www.artsy.net/artwork/awanle-ayiboro-hawa-ali-benita-hand-in-pocket

Figure 2 - Matgilde Le Coz. (2023). Awanle Ayiboro: The Abandoned Playground. https://en.mathildelecoz.com/tap-works

Figure 3 - Kuta, S. (2022, September 6). Art Made With Artificial Intelligence Wins at State Fair. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/artificial-intelligence-art-wins-colorado-state-fair-180980703/

Figure 4 - Christie's (2024, March 9). Annie Morris (B. 1978). https://www.christies.com/en/lot/lot-6470165

Figure 5 - Timothy Taylor. (2024). Annie Morris. https://www.timothytaylor.com/artists/annie-morris/

Figure 6 - Direct Hit!. (2013). Brainless God [Album]. Red Scare.