Is using Artificial Intelligence to help create your art “cheating”?

Over the last year, you would have had to be living in a cave not to notice the overwhelming adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI) everywhere online. For me, every online tool I use now has some kind of AI widget or interface. I have to confess that many of them—enhanced searching and a seemingly inexhaustible knowledge of esoteric topics—make a lot of old, mundane tasks kind of exciting again.

Alongside the adoption of AI by tech companies, there is also a growing number of AI opposers. Those who insist that using AI to enhance or alter your work is somehow cheating.

As an artist and graphic designer, I recently ran into a faction of anti-AI adherents. We were putting together some quick Facebook ads for a Renaissance Festival. Due to budget and time constraints—and being unable to find a suitable image on our royalty-free sites—I asked Grok (or ChatGPT) to generate an image of a typical Renaissance Festival fair, giving clear art direction and specifications for the ad. Happily, it complied and created a marvelous image that we used. The anti-AI faction objected, stating that the festival was a place for artists and artisans to sell their handmade original crafts. In their minds, using AI was a betrayal of the artist’s talents and abilities. Ironically, this objection arrived as a text message sent from a mobile phone but I get it, they wanted to honor the traditional ways.

So as a team of designers and technologists, we began to debate the issue. Was using AI “cheating”?

I have always been an early adopter of technology, going back to the days of desktop publishing. I clearly remember watching whole departments in a large commercial print shop where I worked—departments using equipment that cost millions—vanish because of ever-evolving computing power. Over the span of a couple of years, work that used to take a room full of print professionals and technicians could be done by two or three Photoshop users on a Macintosh. Millions of dollars of equipment became more or less boat anchors.

Fast forward to today. Even though I made my living as a technologist, I have always been involved in the fine arts. Painting, photography, and music have always been my pastimes. There is one painting I have attempted many times over more than twenty years. Not being an illustrator, I need a reference photo or a model to paint from. The image in my head was simply too complicated. I tried various models over the years but could never get the vision in my head to become reality… at least not until AI. On a lark, I described the scene I had carried around all those years to my favorite AI, and voilà—it created the image that had eluded me. With a little tweaking of the prompt, I got a usable image. I opened it in Photoshop, perfected the composition, printed it, and used it as the reference to start the oil painting.

The bottom line is that if you are using Adobe Creative Suite or most other creative software, AI is already built into these platforms—whether you are generating images from prompts or just removing a telephone pole from a photo for better composition.

The image I created with my digital tools is still 100% my idea. And the paint that went onto the canvas is 100% my God-given talent. It went from my imagination to the canvas using the latest technology tools available. Without those tools, I probably would never have attempted this painting. 

In graphic design school back in the ’80s, we used a technique called Free Visual Association. Essentially, before starting a project we would look at other designs, packaging, magazines, ads, and typography examples as part of our research. We were looking for ideas about composition, hierarchy, color, type treatments, concept approaches, and problem-solving strategies that matched the ideas we had developed. Was that cheating? It was taught as part of the process. And just like the artisans that lost their commercial printing jobs in the ’90s because of technology, today much of the research and production work can now be done by AI. I don’t have to hire an illustrator or a photographer or a model to get my reference images/ideas on paper, I can just tell the AI prompt what I want and it happily makes it. And, I might add, it is available whenever I need it wherever I am. 

So, is it cheating? For me, the answer is no. I’m using AI primarily for concept generation and then executing the final artwork by hand or through traditional digital painting. So it’s just another tool in the tool box. I still have to get the generated concept onto the canvas using paint and brushes. Who knows though, very soon technology may be able to do that too if not already.

For more information, search for “general ethics for AI usage in fine art and graphic design” in your favorite search engine. By the way, it’s probably using AI to generate the results.

Unfinished oil painting beside generated AI reference