If Art Has Rules, They Don’t Work Anymore

So, somewhere between “Hey, look what I made,” and “That’s not real art,” the world managed to stumble into yet another one of those age-old debates we apparently never get tired of having.

You’d think after photography, digital illustration, Photoshop, and whatever the hell the 2000s were doing with sepia filters, we’d have learned our lesson. But no, people are back at it again, circling the same bonfire with pitchforks and earnest thinkpieces as if nobody in the history of humanity has ever done this before.

And once more, the question appears, wearing its familiar trench coat like it’s auditioning for a noir film:

“OK, but is it real art?”

Meanwhile, actual creatives are too busy experimenting with whatever their tools of choice are to hear any of it. AI just happens to be the newest guest at this very loud, very dramatic dinner table.

The Problem with the Question (Besides Everything About It)

The trouble isn’t really the question itself, because humans can't seem to help categorizing things, sometimes to an unhelpful degree. The trouble is that the question assumes the matter was ever settled in the first place when it absolutely hasn't been.

We’ve always disagreed on what counts as “real art.”

Ask ten people, and you’ll get ten equally different opinions, a fight, and a full-on dissertation no one asked to hear. Because when something new arrives, the first reaction is apparently always “No, not like that.”

I remember hearing that all the time during my school years whenever I did anything differently from the other students, including throughout my time spent in college pursuing an actual art degree. I heard it again when digital art started becoming a thing. And again when Photoshop showed up. And most recently when AI entered the chat.

As someone who tends to be curious about new ways of doing things, I explored different ways to integrate each of these trends into my creative workflow. And people absolutely lost their shit on me for it every time. Eventually, after hearing multiple variations of “No, not like that” for so many years, I realized something.

Most people don’t actually know what they mean by “real art,” but they will absolutely die on that hill anyway.

Personally speaking, I'm not out to win any popularity contests, so I couldn't care less whether some random person out there thinks my fascination with tools like Midjourney or DALL-E disqualifies me as an artist. I didn't care about meeting anyone else's standards and expectations in art school, and I'm not about to start caring now.

Some people like the images I make these days for the same reasons they liked the stuff I shared on DeviantART 20 years ago. Other people don't, because "Ew, AI." Both groups are entitled to their opinion, but neither really has much of an impact on my creative choices.

Unpacking the Creativity Olympics

Somewhere along the line, someone apparently decided that good art has to hurt. Like, apparently, if you didn’t bleed, cry, pull a muscle, lose sleep, or develop at least one stress-related facial twitch in the process, the art you made doesn’t qualify.

This stance seems especially beloved by older generations, the ones who believed suffering was the only acceptable validation for anything worthwhile, art included. My mother was one of them, someone who would have cheerfully told Bob Ross he was doing it wrong, had she ever met him. Too many "shortcuts" for her taste and definitely not enough suffering involved.

But suffering isn’t a prerequisite for meaning. It never has been.

People confuse effort with value, but they're not the twins everyone wants to think they are. In fact, they’re barely distant cousins. Some brilliant ideas take years and years to express. Some take only minutes. Some people need a chisel to bring their visions to life, while others use a keyboard. None of that ultimately determines whether something resonates with me.

Process Matters, But Not the Way People Think

Some artists are process-driven, and I completely get and support that. For them, the joy is in the physical act of creating. They love the tools, the medium, and the tactile experience of shaping something with their hands. I find that approach legitimate and beautiful.

But not everyone creates that way. I don't create that way and never have, since long before AI (or even computers) were a thing.

Some of us are idea-driven, story-driven, or vision-driven, and the medium is just the delivery system. Because I don’t personally care a whole lot about the envelope or the design of the stamp. I care about the letter inside and what it's saying, full stop.

The only label I've willingly applied to myself is "storyteller," and there's a reason for that. Other people's mileage may vary, but for me, "art or not" is more about the idea and the intention behind something, not whether the person who made it sweated themselves into a coma doing so.

AI hasn't actually changed that at all. It has expanded the range of things I (and others like me) can say in the first place, and that's exactly what I like about it.

I get that people think creators who work with AI are just pressing a button and calling it a day, but those people have clearly never tried to get an AI model to understand what “moody lighting, but not moody-moody, more like humid-Florida-in-August-mood” means. If it were that simple, none of us would be awake at 2 AM muttering, “No, not that kind of cathedral.”

In my experience, working with AI is less like painting and more like directing a film crew that is extremely talented, occasionally unhinged, and forever convinced they know what you meant better than you did.

(This is not entirely unlike working with humans.)

What AI Really Did Was Break an Unspoken Rule

Although it often seems otherwise, AI didn’t actually ignite a new creativity crisis. It poked a hole in a much older one.

For centuries, we’ve carried around this assumption that the value of art comes from the process, the labor, the sweat, the endurance. I feel like the facade was already starting to crack when Photoshop and digital art hit the scene, but then AI waltzed in, placed its neural network elbows on the table, and said:

“But what if the value actually comes from the vision?”

Cue the collective gasp. The same exact reaction I used to get when I'd ask that same question in art class or on DeviantART back in my early '00s days as a semi-popular digital artist.

AI has forced us to confront the uncomfortable reality that someone with a great concept but poor technical skills can now potentially make something compelling. Suddenly, practical skill and expression aren’t the same thing anymore, and that really rattles people.

Because for a long time, “technical difficulty” was used as a shortcut for defining artistic legitimacy. Now? Not so much, and I think that might be a good thing in the long run.

Because art has survived every technological shift so far. It survived the camera, and it survived digital paintbrushes. It survived people who sincerely believed Comic Sans was a good idea.

It will survive AI, too. That much I know.

AI Hasn't Replaced Creativity

One of the statements I'm most tired of hearing from the naysayers out there is, “AI isn’t creative. All it does is imitate.” To which I say, "Have you met humans?"

So much of human creativity has been about remixing, referencing, reinterpreting, and responding to things other people have said, done, and created. In that way, inspiration has always been a collage, as no artist ever emerged from the void untouched by the world.

And don't even get me started on the many, many artists who blatantly made their art about those things. (Andy Warhol and Maurizio Cattelan, I'm looking at you.)

That said, I agree that AI itself is not creativity. But it can facilitate creativity, just like cameras, brushes, pigments, editing suites, and every other tool we’ve ever invented can. The creativity part of the equation has always lived in the human guiding it:

• The choices
• The taste
• The storytelling
• The meaning you attach to the finished results
• The selection and rejection process
• The sense of “yes, this is it” that you get when you're finally finished

AI doesn’t decide any of that. You do.

And when you treat AI as a collaborator in that way, it becomes amazingly helpful. You end up exploring ideas you never would have wandered into alone, and it's a really fascinating process. And believe me, no one was more surprised to find that out than I was. (I was a technophobe once upon a time, many years ago, if you can believe it.)

Honestly, AI is the first tool I’ve ever used that regularly surprises me. Not in that ominous “whoops, it broke” way nobody likes, but in an “oh, I didn’t expect that texture, but I can work with this” way. It's a little bit like improv, but with fewer props, and I've always worked really well that way.

So, What Is Creativity Now That Everything Is Upside-Down?

If AI has taught me anything over the past few years, it’s that our previous definitions of creativity were much smaller than we thought they were. I will personally never see creativity as starting and stopping at suffering, gatekeeping, or a running list of acceptable tools.

I do think it's:

• The idea behind a piece
• The emotional intent the creator poured into what they made
• The symbolic choices
• The vision shaping the outcome

At this point, I feel like people are mistaking the scaffolding for the building (sometimes deliberately). But AI is simply another structure — another way to get oneself from concept to expression. The building itself and the soul of the work still ultimately come from the creator.

Art Isn't Fragile, Our Egos Are

If all the pro-AI/anti-AI debates clogging up my social media feeds these days are anything to go by, I'd have to say that if AI truly makes someone feel threatened? It's likely because their definition of creativity was narrow enough to feel shakeable in the first place.

But creativity rooted in meaning, voice, story, and intent? AI can’t possibly touch any of that.

I get that the quickness of all this has given all of us whiplash, even if for those of us who find AI more exciting than threatening. But we're not entering a post-creative world. It's more like a post-gatekeeping world, and honestly, it’s about time.

Art isn’t dying, because that's just not possible. It is adding a new coat to its wardrobe.