The Future of Artists in the Age of AI

I just read a prediction that said the growth in AI intelligence between now and the end of this year could be comparable to the evolutionary leap from a buzzard to a human being.

When I first saw that, my reaction wasn’t excitement. It was responsibility.

A lot of people are angry about AI. And honestly, that anger is justified. There are real concerns about lack of government oversight, and about the huge environmental cost of these systems. But here’s the truth: we can’t put the genie back in the bottle. So the real question isn’t is AI good or bad. The real question is — who are we going to be inside this moment?

Some people have started to use the term apocalyptimist to describe where they stand — and it’s perfect for this strange moment where enormous risk and enormous possibility exist at the same time. Which makes me smile. Because that’s exactly where artists have always lived.

1. AI generates outputs. Humans generate meaning.

I’ve been having a lot of conversations lately with Jason Sikes, founder and artistic director of Village Green Studios — a Los Angeles-based creative agency serving artists and cultural businesses since 2000. Jason brings a rare blend of strategic creativity and technological fluency, and he has recently launched a new AI venture. I wanted to take our conversations public.

Jason told me that when he brings up AI with artists, the reactions are almost always extreme — either extremely positive or extremely negative. Very few people fall in the middle. And he’s noticed that the ones who are most scared are the ones who haven’t even played with it at all. The ones who are excited are the ones who have decided to see what it can do.

It’s really important that AI not replace authorship, not replace lived experience or discernment or thinking. In a recent conversation in the Working Artist Academy, our mentor Barb Siegel said something incredibly simple but powerful: AI generates outputs and humans generate meaning.

Even the technologists building these systems are beginning to say something very similar. They’ve noticed that when tools can generate almost anything, the real advantage starts to shift — not to the fastest generator, but to the person with the clearest taste, the clearest judgment, the clearest vision. In other words, the person who knows what is actually worth making.

AI is just an extraordinary pattern recognition — but it’s not embodied. It doesn’t have a childhood. It doesn’t fall in love. It doesn’t have its heart broken. It doesn’t struggle with purpose. And those experiences are really the stuff of art. AI can generate images, but it can’t generate a life. And that’s the difference.

Art has never been about who can make the fastest image. It’s always been about who can see something worth saying — and then bring the skill and the courage to say it.

2. Don’t abdicate your voice

I want to give an example of an artist who was using AI to replace his experience. We’ll call him Dave. Dave was someone who was working one on one with me — a brilliant scientist, a published novelist, a poet, with degrees in other fields too. Really brilliant. He had recently started making art and was creating really powerful images using surreal self-portraiture. But his titles, captions, and statements were all kind of bland, and I could tell that he was outsourcing them to AI. I challenged him to stop, but he had a really hard time letting go of that crutch. In spite of his huge achievements, he was really struggling to show his vulnerability — and I think we all know that this is essential to being an artist.

So I suggested that for our next online meeting, we pretend that we’re just two artists sharing a bottle of wine at a café, talking about art. We got into it, we were really relaxing, and then we started to talk about Dave’s art. I started to tell him what I saw. I started to ask questions. And he opened up — his fears, his disappointments, his hopes, his dreams. By the end of that conversation, we had captured all the language we needed to write his titles and captions in a really exciting new way. Not long after, he made his first online sale. And he was accepted to a month-long residency in Europe.

Dave had been choosing abdication of his voice over assistance from AI. But now more than ever, your story and your humanity matter.

3. It is a tool — not a replacement

As Jason says, you can’t even start to use AI without a human, because it starts with a single person — an artist — telling AI what they want. So from the very get-go, a human is involved. It is an assistant, it is a tool, and it’s almost a partner. Not an equal partner. But of all the tools he’s used, this one can have its own opinion. It’s not a human opinion — it’s a machine opinion. And it can be stubborn.

Jason was working on a collage — a man in a lounge chair with a cocktail — and no matter how he phrased it, AI kept giving him the perfect image, except the man had three legs. He could not get rid of that third leg. So he stopped, downloaded the image, brought it into Photoshop, and removed it himself. That’s the point: one of the biggest mistakes artists make, especially initially, is they give AI too much power. They expect too much. They let it do more than it can — or more than it should.

But the flip side? Sometimes it’ll surprise you and give you something more than you wanted. And when that happens — that’s exciting. Jason said the first time it did it, his gut reaction was an emotion. Goosebumps on the back of his neck.

When it comes to asking AI for feedback, the same rule applies to everything in life: gather all the advice you want, weigh it all, keep what works and discard what doesn’t. Don’t take it at its word. It can be wrong. Because it’s not you. Because it’s not human. Sometimes we just abdicate our opinions to other people — and now we’re doing it to machines. It’s no different. We have to hold the locus of truth in ourselves.

I keep coming back to this idea: AI is a mirror. It is a reflection of what we feed it. It reflects our clarity, our confusion, our intentions, our tone. It doesn’t arrive on the scene with its own values — it’s a reflection of ours. And that might be the part that feels the most uncomfortable.

So the question isn’t whether AI will shape the future of art.

The question is what kind of artists we’re going to be inside of this moment.

Whatever we bring to it — ethically, creatively — that’s what it’s going to reflect back. And for now, that part still belongs to us.

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