The days of cruising through stock image websites and typing in specific keywords to find images of google for hours are long gone.

These tools have given the artists not only a helping hand. Still, they have also brought the process of creation to a point where you focus more on creating the art and, due to having a base to work from, can dive much deeper into the concept and narrative and intricately craft your art.

The downside that I have seen develop over the last couple of months since the boom of AI is that the web of judgment and scrutiny has widened regardless of all the beautiful toolsets now publicly available to everyone; even non-artists now have a way of visually telling stories.

Agreed that in every century leading till today, there have been art critics and people who have pushed an artist or doubted him, which in turn have made him even a better artist, but this time, it's different.

The judgment, or might I say, the sentiment developed is more along the lines of doubting the skill of an artist with talks like "He/She probably pushed a button" or "You did this ? come on, what Text prompt did you use ?" is pretty toxic, in my opinion.

The viewer cannot know how the artist made that piece unless he is very technical, but even the most trained eye sometimes cannot distinguish precisely how a visual was created.

Isn't that the magic of art ? Wasn't art supposed to transcend above the tools and the prompts and technology?

The challenge I feel that artists need to face soon would be to prove their talent by having to record the process of creating their work and feel constantly distracted by the eye of a person or camera so society can acknowledge, hence believe that you made the art.

As an artist and now turned director, working professionally for over 23 years, we have always used photos as refs in games & films, etc. What changed now? I hear negativity concerning tools; it's utter nonsense.

I feel all of this will get more complex with time, but in the end, for any artist out there facing this debacle, I would say embrace the future and keep improving and creating.

Remember, "AI needs artists to learn about art."

Thank you for reading
-Fdk