I used to think AI art was cheating until a challenge changed my mind.

I was super against using AI generators at first, figured it wasn't real work. Then my friend dared me to enter a 48-hour digital art contest in Denver where we had to blend AI bases with manual painting in Procreate. I ended up with a piece that actually got some attention, and now I see it as just another tool in the box, not a shortcut. Has anyone else found a specific project that made them rethink their stance?

3 comments

3 Comments

hannah_wright1mo ago

But the question is who's actually doing the creative work. You typed a prompt and painted over some pixels, the AI still made the core decisions about composition and form. If you can't do it from scratch without machine help, it's still a shortcut no matter how much manual touch you add.

clairer791mo ago

@hannah_wright I get that argument but for me it played out different. Started doing photo bashing with ai gens as source material then painting over everything in photoshop. Ended up rebuilding the whole composition from scratch because the ai stuff was too generic. The machine gave me color palettes and texture ideas but all the real choices about lighting, focal points, and story came from my hand. If someone makes 80% of the decisions after the prompt that's still their work.

cameroncarr1mo ago

yeah i had this same debate with a friend who does digital painting. i found that once i started treating the AI gen as raw material instead of the final piece, i actually ended up changing like 80% of it. it became more about selecting and refining than prompting, and that felt way more like my own work.