In 2022, Colorado-based artist Jason Allen took the internet by storm after his piece “Théâtre D’opéra Spatial” won first place in the digital art category at the Colorado State Fair’s annual art competition. The reaction wasn’t congratulatory — Allen faced widespread outrage when artists discovered his winning piece was generated using artificial intelligence.
The prevalence of AI within the graphic design community and the broader art world has expanded in recent years, keeping pace with AI’s growing presence in other industries. Major brands like Coca-Cola and BMW have launched ad campaigns starring art made with AI art generators. There has also been an increase in “AI artists” — those who create many kinds of art with the assistance of advanced algorithms. This expansion is visible in the value of the AI image-generation market, which totaled $419.2 million in 2024 and is projected to grow to $1.88 billion by 2033.
Aaron Leung, a freshman at Northeastern University, believes the skyrocketing use of AI in art is due to its accessibility and efficiency.
“If somebody needs something done last-minute for a poster, ad, project, whatever it might be, it can be a good way to get some sort of graphic.”
The increasing prevalence of AI use has many illustrators, designers and artists worried about what it will mean for their livelihoods and has some reaching for ways to constrain AI’s ability to use human-made work for training.
Machine learning has been used to create graphics for longer than you might think. British artist Harold Cohen was among the first to explore integration between AI and art when in 1973 he launched AARON, an AI program that generates drawings and paintings. The field took a leap forward in the 2010s with the creation of GANs — generative adversarial networks — a type of algorithm created by American computer scientist Ian Goodfellow and his colleagues that made AI art look more “human-created.” Many heavily trafficked AI art generators such as Artbreeder, DeepArt and Midjourney use GANs to train their models to come up with convincing graphics — and a growing number of those tools can produce a drawing from a few words within seconds.
That ease of function has led major brands to use AI programs to fulfill their marketing and graphic design needs. Some companies, including Coca-Cola, BMW and Disney have already begun using AI art in their marketing campaigns. In March 2023, Coca-Cola launched its “Create Real Magic” campaign in partnership with OpenAI and Bain & Company. Coca-Cola encouraged customers to explore their new website, which allows users to generate their own digital art using iconic Coca-Cola imagery. Disney has also been repeatedly accused of using AI art, including in their promotional posters and in their films for opening credits scenes and animation production. BMW has integrated AI art into their marketing through personalized campaigns and other business initiatives.
Many artists are worried that this type of AI usage for graphic design or other artistic products will hurt their livelihoods. Fifty five percent of artists worry that AI art will hinder their ability to earn income using their own art, according to a survey by Book an Artist. Twenty six percent of illustrators report they’ve already lost work to generative AI, according to another survey by Society of Authors.
Young artist Olivia Zhao, a senior at Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda, Maryland, worries that as AI-generated art becomes continually more advanced, hiring opportunities for artists will decline.
“Many companies would rather save money by turning to AI to generate work for them instead of commissioning an actual artist,” Zhao said.
Zhao also worries the growing use of AI software to create art will dilute the essence of what art is.
“Most of the value of art isn’t in the artwork itself, but rather the effort of creation and the meaning behind the work,” she said. “AI-generated art is completely stripped of these qualities.”
Young artist Cheska Orias, a senior at McKinley High School in Honolulu, Hawaii, agreed, saying that the uncanny perfection of AI art pieces makes them appear “soulless.”
As AI art generators become more common, including on social media, concern has led to pushback. Artists on TikTok and Instagram are using new hashtags like #NoAIart, #HumanArt, and #antiaiart to express opposition to AI-backed tools like TikTok’s AI filters.
Artists and those who support them are also taking measures that seek to place limits on how models train on human-made work, and to compensate artists when their work has been used — with or without their permission — in a training program. Some artists, for instance, are filing lawsuits against tech firms, claiming that the AI models are using their intellectual property without permission and are in breach of copyright. More than 50,000 individuals, including celebrities like Abba’s Björn Ulvaeus, Julianne Moore and Radiohead lead singer Thom Yorke, have signed a statement condemning “the unlicensed use of creative works for training generative AI,” calling it “a major, unjust threat to the livelihoods of the people behind those works.”
Other advocates are calling for notification and fair compensation when their work is used in training databases.
In a 2023 Washington Post interview, illustrator Karla Ortiz said, “These AI companies use our work as training data and raw materials for their AI models without consent, credit or compensation.”
Some have also started leveraging advanced technology to combat unlicensed use of human-made art by AI art generators. Glaze, a tool released by the University of Chicago in 2023, aims to help artists protect their work from use by machine learning models by alternating certain pixels.
Nightshade, a tool invented by the University of Chicago in 2024, also distorts artwork to the “AI eye.” However, while Glaze is meant to be used as a defensive mechanism, Nightshade allows all artists to use it as a group to collectively disrupt AI scraping — the collecting of data from websites through artificial intelligence. The software has been downloaded 2.2 million times since it launched.
According to the developers at the University of Chicago, “The Glaze Project (including Glaze, Nightshade, WebGlaze and others) is a research effort that develops technical tools with the explicit goal of protecting human creatives against invasive uses of generative artificial intelligence or GenAI.”
Not all graphic designers and other artists are against the use of AI — some think it can create economic opportunities. Lisa Vleming, a graphic designer who works with small clients, told NPR’s Marketplace she sees potential to take on clients with smaller budgets if she can accelerate her work with the use of machine learning tools.
Surrealist digital artist Elise Swopes suggested to NPR that incorporating AI tools into her workflow in Adobe could let her take on more work. If she’d had the ability to use the tools earlier, she said, “I would have saved myself maybe years off my life.”