AI Won’t Kill Art. It Will Kill Excuses.

The unease surrounding artificial intelligence in the arts is nothing new. Every advance in technology has been greeted with cries of decline: the camera would destroy painting; the synthesiser would kill music; Photoshop would flatten creativity. Yet again and again, what actually emerges is not death but expansion. Technology has never extinguished art—it has altered its conditions and multiplied its forms.

Andy Warhol’s silkscreens and Man Ray’s rayographs are touchstones here. Neither artist invented the technologies they embraced, but both recognised their disruptive potential. Warhol exploited the mechanical reproduction of the silkscreen to probe the absurdities of consumer culture. Man Ray bent the camera toward chance, using solarisation and rayographs to dissolve the boundary between documentation and experiment. Both were accused of vulgarity, of gimmickry, of undermining the integrity of art. Both helped redefine it.

AI should be understood in the same way. It is not a death knell but a mirror—one that reflects cultural anxieties as vividly as it reflects human intent.

Who Gets to Create

The deepest disruption of AI lies not in its aesthetics but in its access. For centuries, the art world has functioned as a careful composite of talent and bullshit, sustained by institutions that conferred legitimacy as much as they recognised it. Elites could afford to confuse the two; in fact, the performance of knowing was often more valuable than knowing itself. AI dismantles that whole architecture. When anyone can make, the bluff is harder to maintain. The gates no longer guarantee authority, and the rituals of exclusivity begin to look like what they always were: camouflage.

This, inevitably, unleashes oceans of mediocrity. But mediocrity has never been the enemy of brilliance. The Kodak camera produced millions of banal images, but it did not erase Cartier-Bresson. GarageBand spawned a wave of amateur beats, but it also gave birth to entire genres. YouTube may be awash with trivia, yet it has amplified voices that would never have reached the academy or the gallery. Banality is cheap; originality is still scarce.

And notice who shrieks loudest that AI is “killing creativity.” More often than not, it is writers and cultural commentators whose standing depends less on talent than on the aura of difficulty. Their panic reads less like cultural critique and more like autobiography: they sense their own ideas are not strong enough to survive once execution is no longer a barrier. AI has made the means abundant. What remains scarce is imagination.

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Painters in the Machine Age

Artists already working in the hybrid zone between analogue and digital make this clear. Edinburgh-born Norrie Harman, for instance, is both a classically trained painter and a digital deconstructivist. His canvases draw on Bacon and German Expressionism, conjuring derelict landscapes and abandoned spaces, but he also feeds images through algorithms he has coded to fracture, corrupt, and glitch them. The result is a dialogue between hand and machine: oil paint that bears the weight of history colliding with digital interference that mirrors the instability of contemporary life. Harman doesn’t see AI or digital tools as corrosive to painting; he treats them as solvents that expose fresh textures and new meanings.

Similarly, Miss AL Simpson layers fashion iconography, crypto symbolism, and AI-driven mutations into works that oscillate between the tactile and the synthetic. Her collages and animated pieces don’t abandon the traditions of mixed media—they extend them into the twenty-first century’s data-saturated environment.

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Neither artist has been diminished by the rise of AI. Both demonstrate how vision shapes the tool, not the other way round.

The Irony of the AI Revolution

The real dangers of AI do not live in the gallery. They live in the boardrooms of Silicon Valley and in the contracts funnelled to the military-industrial complex. The same billionaires who bankroll image generators are also investing in drones, surveillance systems, and predictive policing. Their machines sketch portraits with one hand and target coordinates with the other. In this sense, art may be AI’s most ethical application.

Toward an Honest Reckoning

In the end, AI is best understood as a cultural solvent. It dissolves the old scaffolding of privilege—access to training, to resources, to patronage—and leaves behind only the idea itself. Weak concepts will sink into the flood of generated imagery. Strong ones will rise above it, as they always have.

Far from killing art, AI reveals its oldest truth: art has never been about the tool. It has always been about the vision.

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