When AI eats art, what's left for artists?

When generative AI removes the manual labour of producing art, what is left for the artist? In the past year, any artist using AI has faced online abuse. Companies caught using AI generated assets are boycotted. The backlash is growing — fueled by the belief that AI art isn’t real art, and that it holds no value.

This attitude has really surprised me — especially coming from artists themselves—as it shows that huge groups of professionals don’t understand what they are selling. I’m here to persuade you that artists are hired for their taste more than their skill, and this will only become more obvious as time goes on. We are moving into a taste economy.

Putting pen to paper (or stylus to tablet) is the manual labour involved in creating art, but the art itself is the product. If you hire a contractor to build you a deck, the product isn’t the contractor hammering nails all day — the product is the deck. You hire a professional because every skillset is a universe of knowledge. The professional has spent their entire life learning how to make decks that are functional, built to last, and aesthetic. You hire this one because other decks they’ve made look great and age well. When the nail gun is invented, we don’t weep for the loss of people hammering nails—we celebrate that the most skilled deck builders can now make more beautiful decks faster. A nail gun doesn’t replace a carpenter, it replaces a hammer.

One second to hammer a nail, ten years to know where to hammer the nail.

A lot of the creative world already works this way. Studio Ghibli isn’t just Hayao Miyazaki putting brush and pen to paper—he has a team of people helping him realize his vision. Are you watching a Ghibli movie because you knew he had teams of people slaving away to make it? Of course not. His taste and ideas are what you’re buying when you buy a Ghibli movie—not the labour of the individuals in the studio becoming one with their graphics tablets. It's likely that all of your favorite artists with studios have people working for them who do the production, while the name artist provides the ideas and makes tweaks to get it how they like. There’s already a name for this: Art Direction. Art Direction is the profession of providing taste to those who are still developing theirs.

We all know someone with bad taste — whether it’s gaudy, clashing clothing, a house decked out in garish nonsense, or music that gives you a headache. If you needed art for your walls and had to use AI to create it, who would you rather direct the process—your favourite artist or that person? It’s your favourite artist.

This reduction in cost will lower the barrier to creating art. People will be able to express their taste more freely, and it’s possible we’ll end up in an age of artistic abundance — without beautiful things being locked behind extremely high price tags due to the labour involved. But this art will not create itself without the effort of people who care about making better and better work.

Developing taste requires effort.

You need to create a lot of things before you’re good at creating things. No matter the medium, this is the most expensive slice of the pie when you buy art: the time it takes to know what looks good or bad, what is evocative or neutral, what feels clean and what feels grungy. Then to take that knowledge and apply it to a message, brand, fabric print, short film, album cover, etc. It takes a lot of work, and those hours must be put in by a human.

In many ways, modern art has already grokked this fact. So much of it is performative. When there are literally thousands of people in the world who share the technical painting skill of DaVinci, it no longer stands out on the cutting edge to simply replicate that level of skill. 'I could’ve made that' is the knee-jerk reaction in most modern art galleries with 'But you didn’t' being the common comeback. Perhaps more appropriate is: 'No, you couldn’t' - 'You don’t have the context, desire, or experience to make it.'

Yes, AI will flood the world with mediocre art. So did the invention of the camera, the synthesizer, and Canva. But when everyone can generate a sunset, we’ll still pay $200 million for a Rothko—because taste is the ultimate scarcity.

Not everyone even wants to be an artist. Some people simply do not care, or they have preferences about the kind of art they want to make. I know a tattoo artist who would rather work at Amazon than spend all day “arranging lines and text” doing graphic design. They don’t want to invest the time it takes to get good at any tool, no matter how easy it is. When they need graphic design done, they outsource it to someone who cares—someone whose taste they trust.

This 'individuals sell taste' mindset is also prevalent in software engineering. The difference between a junior and a senior engineer is taste. A junior can be technically strong but hasn’t been in the trenches long enough to know what kind of code structure scales and what doesn’t. The job of the senior developer (or software architect) is to write patterns that are flexible and scalable, with juniors filling in the gaps. The value of “taste” as the core skill of advanced developers is evident in the popularity of frameworks. A framework is, in essence, a set of opinions about software written in code. It reflects the collective taste of the team who wrote it. We even call frameworks that require you to follow their conventions strongly ‘opinionated’.

The software development community has understandably embraced AI much faster, using the same principles. Instead of complaining about a loss of jobs, the best engineers I know have evaluated the tools, adopted the ones that empower them, and discarded the ones that don’t. AI reads my codebase, writes small snippets, and gives me structural advice (which I often ignore). This could be a way forward for artists—embracing the tools to produce faster and become more ubiquitous.

Just like in software, the most valuable skill for an artist is being opinionated.

In this new taste economy you must escape into authenticity. No-one can be you as well you can. Double down on what you love and do not compromise for a generic output, because generic is too cheap, and showing off your taste is priceless. If I were alive in 1930, no AI would’ve let me produce The Persistence of Memory. That painting wasn’t just technique—it was a reflection of Dalí’s inner world. His fears, dreams, and opinions about time and decay. I could feed all of an artists work into an AI system and have it produce more output, but as its not built on opinion all that will be left is a generic approximation of their prior work, with none of the value that comes from the human behind it. You can see this in the recent Ghibli-fy everything trend. That we can make all of our profile pictures look like they were made by Miyazaki, it doesn’t mean they were. That trend has come and gone and we will all still go and see the next Ghibli production, because without his mind behind it, the art is worthless. His style isn’t the product — taste is, and without Miyazaki’s mind behind the frame, the work is just an empty aesthetic.