Opinion
AI ‘art’ is boring, soulless theft – and when I see it as an artist I see red
Jess Harwood
I draw the old way – with my hand. Doing it with AI would not make me more creative, it would drain the colour out of my existence
Wed 27 May 2026 22.37 EDT

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As a visual artist and writer myself, when I see AI generated images, music or words presented as “art”, I see red. It’s boring, it’s theft, it’s soulless, sterile and it’s killing the planet through energy and water-guzzling datacentres. Someone suggested AI “visual art” should be called “Computer Rendered Artificial Pictures” (CRAP).

It’s not just me. In the Australian comic art community, festivals like the Perth Comics Arts festival have denounced AI, saying they “will not knowingly promote AI-generated materials, nor will we allow any such work to be a part of our festival”. I pumped my fist in the air when I heard this.

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When people are moved by art, they want to know the artist and about the artistic process that created it – they want to know the band, they buy their merch to say “I saw them live”, they would die of happiness if they could grab a coffee with Neil Finn and ask him about his creative life (what about it, Neil?).

Who is behind AI “art”? The machine? The person who wrote the prompt? The tech bro who built the AI that scraped human artistic skill and creation to generate the “art”? Legal issues about authorship and copyright aside, what could any of them possibly say about the process of generating the image that would have any capacity to move someone or reveal something about the human experience or an artistic process? “I typed the prompt and pressed enter” – amazing bro, good work.

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