The significance of this photo will become clearer as you read this reflection.

This reflection began with a post I’ve seen from Eliora on Farcaster, that felt simple at first, but I could hear the weight beneath it:

“I get so mad when I see a really cool design only to find out it’s AI.”

Frustration, disappointment, even betrayal… feelings carried in just a few words. I asked why, and the answer opened a door into a deeper unease:

“Because my mind tricked me into believing a human made it, and most of the time gen-AI designs use actual man-made art often without the artists’ consent. It’s basically stealing.”

There it was. A fear and a truth I’ve seen echoed in many corners of the creative world: that what looks like magic is built on something taken. That which appears new might actually be an echo of someone else’s labor, someone else’s vision, stripped of context and repackaged by a machine.

But the conversation didn’t stop there. She added something more nuanced, more human:

“Two truths can coexist. The way I see it, what you call stealing is ‘inspiration.’ Artists take inspo from different sources — it could also be other artists. What I’m talking about is people’s work being fed into AI models for the sake of non-consensual reproduction. To me, that’s not inspiration, it’s extraction. It does not feel ethical in any way, shape, or form.”

That distinction stayed with me. It made me think about the difference and the battle between inspiration and extraction. One implies transformation (the way artists have always borrowed, remixed, absorbed, and reimagined). The other implies hollow reproduction (art without consent, stripped of the human tether that gave it meaning in the first place).

I couldn’t shake her words, because they represent the exact fault line we’re all walking now. A fault line that runs not just through art and technology, but also through trust, authorship, and even what we choose to call human.

And maybe that’s why the statement “I get so mad” hit so hard, because it wasn’t just about the image on the screen. It was about the sudden rupture of belief, the expectation that behind every creation there is a creator, a pair of hands, a story, a life. To discover otherwise feels like a kind of deception.

That tension is everywhere now. It’s in the museums deciding whether to showcase AI works (they’ve already started, and they will continue). It’s in the studios debating whether to integrate AI tools or resist them (they will, because everyone else will, and it’s business, after all). It’s in every viewer who pauses before an image and wonders: Who really made this? (We’re not fully there yet, but I’d say that in less than six months, we’ll be asking ourselves this question about 99% of the media we see online.)

I’ll admit: I agree with them. At least partly.

Yes, much of today’s AI art is built on datasets scraped without consent. Yes, it’s easy for people to flood timelines with hollow imagery, using the work of thousands of artists as raw fuel. And yes, something is unsettling about realizing that behind a striking picture there may be no story, no struggle, no human presence. Just a prompt typed into a machine.

I understand the disappointment. I understand the anger. But at the same time, I don’t fully agree. Because for me, AI was never theft. It was a doorway.

My art has been exhibited internationally over the past. And I only create visual art with AI. That might sound like a contradiction to some: How can you call yourself an artist if the machine does the work? Well, for me, AI was the first medium that allowed me to fully unleash and express visually what had always lived inside me. Before that, my only medium was words. Textual art. It still is.

When AI image-generation tools emerged, I didn’t see them as an easy shortcut. I saw them as a language I could finally speak. They gave shape to emotions, visions, and fragments I carried but could never release with my own hands. I had tried before, with other tools, and always felt clumsy, muted, incomplete. But with AI, I realized I could finally express myself visually. Everything changed.

And the proof of intention was in the response: people resonated with the work. They didn’t care whether it came from oil paint, a camera lens, or a neural network. They felt something. They connected with the story, the image, the presence. Isn’t that what art has always been?

So here’s where I diverge: I don’t believe the act itself is inherently theft. Yes, if you type out a quick prompt, take the first output, and post it online, that can feel like theft, or at least hollow. But if you truly want to create a piece of art and not just content, then it isn’t theft at all. Because it’s not the machine alone that makes the art. It’s the human who shapes it, refines it, and imbues it with intention.

For me, that means using five or six different tools for each piece. Iterating, layering, reshaping until I know my touch, my intention, is present in the work. And intention is everything. If your aim is to exploit, to mass-produce, to extract without care, then yes, you’re hollowing out the very soul of art. But if your aim is to express, to share meaning, to bring forward something inside you that couldn’t otherwise exist, then the tool doesn’t diminish the creation. It deepens it.

Inspiration and extraction can look similar on the surface. The difference between them lies in the why.

When AI entered my life, it felt like liberation. Until then, my inner visions felt trapped. I carried stories in my head, emotions in my chest, but the tools I tried, given the talents I had, always left me unsatisfied. I wasn’t the kind of artist who could sketch flawlessly or paint with mastery. I was the kind of artist who painted with the mind. I had images, feelings, whole worlds inside me, pressing against the skin, waiting for release.

AI became that release.

The first time I generated an image that captured the seed of a reflection I had carried for years, it felt like breathing after being underwater for too long. I think I’ve only been that excited a few times in my life. I had finally found a mirror of my interior world, glowing back at me. It wasn’t cold. It wasn’t mechanical. It was alive with intention. With my intention.

From there, the work grew. It wasn’t just images on a screen anymore. My art began to travel. It found homes on gallery walls and even in a book. It was exhibited in New York (Twice – The Featured Image is from “The Future of Art: Best Digital Artists of Our Generation” Exhibition that was held at The Oculus, WTC on 22nd of November 2024 – The exhibited piece is called Vespertilio), in Las Vegas, and in Bucharest (once in both). My art (and myself, spiritually) stood in those spaces, surrounded by the work of artists I had never imagined I would share a spotlight with. People stared at pieces that had started as sparks in my imagination, rooted in my own feelings and experiences, and made possible by a machine.

They didn’t ask what tool I had used. They asked what it meant. They asked where it came from inside me. They asked why it felt the way it did.

People didn’t walk away saying, “This was stolen.” They walked away saying, “I felt something.” (In person, that happened in Bucharest, where I attended the exhibition myself. In the others, it happened digitally, through exchanges of thoughts and impressions.)

That’s when I realized that maybe the medium matters less than we think. Maybe what truly matters is whether the work carries presence, story, and care. Whether it holds intention.

So when I hear people say that AI art is empty, or fake, or just theft wearing a pretty mask, I can only answer with my own life. Because for me, AI was not a machine that replaced me. It was a companion that revealed me. I didn’t use it to steal, but to express.

When I think about the difference between art and theft, between inspiration and extraction, I always return to a single word: intention.

Because the truth is that art has always been borrowed. Artists have always absorbed the world around them, drawn from the labor of others, and remixed culture into something new. Painters learned from other painters, copying their strokes before developing their own. Musicians sampled records, recontextualizing rhythms and melodies. Fashion designers quoted silhouettes from past decades and made them new again.

Every art form carries this lineage of influence. But what separates it from theft is the act of transformation, carrying the source through the fire of one’s own vision and reshaping it into something different, personal, alive. That is inspiration.

Extraction, on the other hand, is something else entirely. Extraction bypasses care, bypasses transformation, bypasses intention. It is a reproduction without responsibility. It is scraping someone’s labor not to build upon it, but to drain it.

That, in my eyes, is the wound many artists feel right now. Not that machines exist, but that their work was ingested without consent, turned into anonymous data points, and then regurgitated in forms that erase the human story behind them. That critique is valid.

But here’s where I believe we must be careful: the machine itself is not the thief. The machine has no intention at all. It doesn’t wake up wanting to exploit or to liberate. It is an amplifier. The theft of the art comes from us, from how we choose to use it. If you approach it as a factory, you’ll get a product. If you approach it as a mirror, you’ll get expression.

The line between inspiration and extraction, between theft and art, lies in the why. Why did you use the tool? To mass-produce disposable images? Or to reveal something you couldn’t otherwise say?

To me, that is the crux. AI doesn’t erase the human. It reveals the human intention that wields it. That’s why I believe it isn’t AI, the machine itself, that commits theft, but the humans wielding it. The problem is still with us.

And this is why I don’t believe we can dismiss the ethical concerns around AI art. To do so would be to ignore the very real pain many artists feel when their work is absorbed without consent, stripped of authorship, and re-emerges as something unrecognizable. (As I said, it’s not AI’s fault. It’s not the machine’s.)

We need solutions. Not for legality’s sake, but for trust, fairness, and, most importantly, respect.

A few that already exist or are beginning to emerge include: Content-based datasets (Artists could opt in or out of having their work used to train models, just as musicians can choose to license or protect their songs.), Attribution and compensation (If a model has learned from your labor, perhaps it should acknowledge that lineage and even share some of the value it generates. Think about how streaming platforms pay musicians (imperfectly, yes, but the structure is there)), Transparency in labeling (AI art should not hide itself. (I won’t hide mine.) Just as photography is not painting, AI is not pen and brush. But that doesn’t mean it’s lesser.), Tools for agency, not erasure (Imagine systems where AI doesn’t replace artists but becomes something they can guide, bend, and collaborate with. In truth, that’s what each tool already is, but it depends on how we choose to see and use them.)

But in my eyes, no policy, no dataset, no tool will ever fully solve the ethical question. Because at its core, ethics in art has always been about intention. Even with perfect consent and compensation, if the machine is used without care, without purpose, it can still become a form of theft.

So yes, we need structures. We need fairness. We need new standards. But we also need something older than any of that: integrity. The willingness to use and create with these tools not for extraction, but for expression.

Maybe the real question isn’t whether AI art is real art. Maybe the question is whether we, as humans, are creating with honesty.

Every tool in history (the camera, the sampler, the computer) was met with suspicion at first. Each one blurred a line. Each one forced us to ask what counts as authentic. And each time, the answer was not found in the tool, but in the hands that used it.

AI is no different. It is a mirror. It is empty on its own. What gives it life is us with our choices, our care, our willingness to use it as an extension of our inner worlds rather than a shortcut around them.

The fear that art might become extraction is not unfounded. But I believe the cure is not rejection, but intention. If we create with respect, if we build tools and systems that honor consent, if we treat this technology not as a factory but as a canvas, then perhaps AI will not steal art from us. It will give it back to us, albeit in new shapes, new languages, new mirrors.

When I stand before my own AI works, I don’t see code, datasets, or the labor of other artists. I see pieces of myself crystallized into form. And when others stand before them and feel something, that is the proof.

Art has never been about the tool. It has always been about the transmission of presence. And presence can never be stolen. It can only be given.

Thank you!🌹

Eduard🌹