Artificial intelligence (AI) art, a beautifully deceiving “art form” and a rapidly growing trend among social media. It primarily has taken over TikTok, and thousands of users have expressed both negative and positive comments about it. But one thing that most people tend to ignore, is how this rising popularity, will affect human artists.

For those who are not aware, AI art is when an AI provides some assistance in creating “art” through AI programs/websites. These websites allow the user to input custom images or text to create unique pieces of art that correlate to their input. Some of the most popular AI art programs that have been circulating are Lensa, DALL-E, Jasper Art, and Starry AI.

Recently, there have been people that have been profiting off of these AI-generated images, by selling them on platforms like Twitter and TikTok, and on occasion, their own online shops. These people claim that these images belong solely to them. There’s a big issue that comes with this, which is copywriting. Copyright laws in the United States do not cover art that is made by artificial intelligence, so this can allow the person who got the images from the AI, to copyright it as their own work. There have been some arguments made by various online users, that say you cannot copyright AI art, but currently, this is still up for debate by the internet.

There have been some people that make AI art, who don’t understand that art is a thing that takes time and effort, not just five seconds to insert a prompt into some website and get several different images. Some people will do anything to make easy money, even in unreasonable ways like this. Why would a consumer pay for AI art from another person, which is something that they can very well make in their own time? What makes the seller’s AI art so much more unique or valuable?

This leads to how AI actually works. The AI has access to millions of images across the web, this is how those images are formed, taking either the main focus or small details of an image to create the final product. This can discredit the owners of the original images it has taken from. The AI is using these images without the compensation or consent of the original artists, this is completely unknown to them what their art is being used for.

Multiple human artists have expressed how fearful and angry they are, calling AI art unethical and absurd. Concerns have been raised that in the near future, the demand for artwork created by humans will significantly decrease and that their value will be overthrown by AI art.

With such a high demand on social media for AI art already, human artists will need to be pushing themselves even harder to work against the competition that they’ve got, but of course, some artists take days, weeks, or even months to complete their work. Content for AI art is posted on the internet at a faster rate, so attention could possibly be more directed to that, rather than human artists who share their work online. It is common knowledge that humans over time have started to crave a want for immediate content. Humans enjoy distractions from anything and everything they’d rather not do. People who use AI art as their stream of content, are perfect to fill this need that people subconsciously have. The internet is usually how most artists will gain an audience, it helps them connect with other people and gives them a better opportunity for their work. AI art will clog up people’s online feeds, and this will lead to human artists becoming unhopeful of being successful.

It’s important to educate the world about how this will only cause more harm than good. Human art has many things that AI art does not, and one of those things especially- is hard work. While the question still lingers if AI will truly replace human artists, there are some who have high doubts this will ever become a reality in the future. They say that AI lacks creativity and the enjoyment of the art process. Human artists will always have the support and encouragement of others to keep doing what they do best.