Let’s talk about AI. Let’s talk about art. Let’s talk about generative AI in art.
My thoughts on the discourse around @Vengenz1's words, and why I think “creating vs creativity” is the only part of the thread that really matters. https://x.com/i/article/2115880113099448320
Do Artists Dream of Electric Sheep?
On creating, creativity, and the hand behind the prompt...and ZV stirring the pot.
Let's talk about AI. Let's talk about art. Let's talk about generative AI in art.
In the middle of all the noise, @Vengenz1 said the one thing I think actually matters: the important dialogue is "creating vs creativity."
That line is where I land. AI can create. It can produce an image, a texture, a shirt graphic in seconds. Creativity is something else. It is the intent behind the thing, the taste that decides what stays and what goes, and the care someone puts in before they call it finished. A machine can generate. Only a person can mean. AI doesn't take the human out of art. It shows you whether there was one there to begin with.
I'm not writing this to convince anyone. I'm writing it because I've been sitting with this for a while, I've used these tools in my own work, and I think the honest position is more complicated than either side of that thread.
My training data
I have loved and followed Wes Lang's work since 2012. When he and Ye released the Yeezus tour merch in 2013, I had a visceral reaction to it. As simple as those pieces were, I adored the composition: 80s metal-inspired Americana, a heavy, condensed sans-serif paired with handwritten, esoteric musings. It resonated with me immediately, and it has been my default composition for shirts ever since. Both DBC shirts are proof of that.
Other artists live in my DNA too: Damien Hirst, KAWS, Murakami, Duchamp, Mark Maggiori, Matthew McCormick, and James Turrell, to name a few. So do designers like Virgil, Nigo, Jerry Lorenzo, and Pharrell. The list goes on. I have trained my eye on all of them.
Like every budding designer, I've tried to copy the things I love. Sometimes it worked. Mostly it didn't. I kept trying anyway, because copying is how you find out what you are actually reaching for.
I am the synthesis of everything before me
My perspective as a designer is unique, but not because it came from nowhere. It is an amalgamation of every influence I just named, and the collision of those influences is what births something new. In the language of AI, I have combed through years of my own training data and tried to produce something from it.
Can AI do the same? I'm not sure. But I'm also NOT not sure. A model is an amalgamation of what it was trained on, and in a real sense, so are we.
Where I think the comparison breaks is in how the training happened. Nobody handed me my influences. I chose them. I stood in front of the work, bought the shirts, saved the images, and failed at copying them for years. My training data was lived, and every piece of it cost me something: time, money, or a little pride. A model doesn't choose what it learns from, and most of the artists it learned from were never asked. That grievance is real, and I don't think the people who feel it are just afraid of the future. I can hold that and still believe the tool has a place in the work. Both things are true.
AI is a medium
AI is not sentient. At least not yet. It is a tool, and just like paint, marker, and pencil, tokens are a medium an artist or designer can choose to express themselves through. The intent still comes from a human being. The medium just carries it.
I read something this morning that stuck with me:
"What is technically possible isn't always humanly meaningful."
I agree with that. The possibility belongs to the machine. The meaning belongs to us.
Duchamp understood this over a hundred years ago. He bought a urinal, signed it, put it in an exhibition, and people are still arguing about whether it counts as art. He didn't make the object. He made the choice. That choice is the whole piece. A factory made the urinal, but nobody remembers the factory. They remember Duchamp.
A while ago I made cover art for a friend. As an experiment, I decided to use AI-generated art as the medium. Every single asset in that piece came out of a model. I still had a hand in every part of the design. I digitally hand-painted over it. I edited the proportions and the lighting, and I added grain, effects, and details. By the time I was done, some people didn't recognize it as AI at all.
That process didn't stifle my creativity. If anything, it enhanced it. The model handled the creating, which freed me to spend my time on the creativity.
Slop is a human choice
So when AI slop shows up on the timeline with no refinement, I don't blame the tool. A person generated it, looked at it, and decided it was good enough to post. That is a choice, and it says more about the person than about the medium. Bad photographs never made photography a fraud.
This is where Zacky's harshest line lives. He said AI can't replace artists like Wes, Cam, and Micah, but it can replace anyone replaceable. I don't fully agree with how he said it. I don't think most of the designers losing work right now are lazy or greedy. A lot of them are talented people in a brutal market, and calling them complacent is easy from where he stands.
But I can't pretend the underlying point is wrong. If your value lives entirely in execution, in pushing pixels to someone else's spec, a machine is coming for that, and it was always going to. What it can't replace is the eye: the point of view, the decision about what is worth making in the first place. The safe harbor of pure execution is gone. The harbor of taste is still open.
Look at what Zacky actually does, too. He buys Eddie's artwork and praises him constantly. He calls Wes, Cam, and Micah friends he deeply values. The same person who prefers his prompts still pays for the human hand. When anyone can generate an image, the image stops being rare. The person behind it becomes the rare thing.
Do androids dream of electric sheep?
In Philip K. Dick's novel, the test that separates humans from androids doesn't measure intelligence or skill. It measures empathy. At the end, Rick Deckard finds a toad in the desert, an animal everyone thought was extinct. It turns out to be electric. His wife orders artificial flies for it anyway, because her husband is devoted to it.
The toad is fake. The care is real. That is the difference between creating and creativity. A model can create the toad. Whether it becomes art depends on whether a person shows up to care about it.
I'm going to keep training my eye on the people I love, and I'm going to keep using every medium available to me, tokens included. The tools will keep changing. The job won't.
Somebody still has to care.