I have a confession to make. According to the gatekeepers of the art world, I have been a fraud for thirty years.
I am currently watching the creative world tear itself apart over Artificial Intelligence. I see the vitriol, the black squares on social media, and the aggressive comments declaring that anyone using Midjourney or Stable Diffusion is “not a real artist.” I hear the cries that this technology is theft, that it is lazy, and that it lacks the human soul required to be considered art.
And I can’t help but laugh. Not because I lack empathy, but because I have heard this exact song before. In fact, I’ve heard it three separate times, in three separate decades, across three separate mediums.
I am a serial cheater. I am a thief. I am a button-pusher. And if you are an artist working today, chances are, you are too.
It is time we talk about the staggering hypocrisy of the modern “Real Artist,” and why the line drawn in the sand against AI is being drawn by people who are already standing in quicksand.
1996: The Death of Photography
My life of “crime” began in Junior High. I fell in love with photography. Back then, the barrier to entry was physical. It smelled like chemicals. It required darkness. You had to understand aperture, ISO, and shutter speed, not because they were settings on a screen, but because if you got them wrong, you wasted physical film that cost money you didn’t have.
Then came High School. The year was 1996. I sat down in front of a beige computer tower and opened a piece of software called Photoshop.
To the purists of the mid-90s, this was the end of the world.
I remember showing a manipulated image to a mentor—a composition where I had dodged and burned digitally, perhaps composited two elements that weren’t originally in the same frame. I was proud. I was exploring surrealism.
The reaction wasn’t praise; it was dismissal.
“That’s not real photography,” they said. “The computer did the work. You’re cheating. Real photography happens in the darkroom. It happens in the chemicals. This is just pixel pushing.”
The argument was that by removing the physical struggle—the possibility of ruining the print in the developer bath—I had removed the art. They claimed that because I could hit “Undo,” the stakes were gone, and therefore the soul was gone.
Sound familiar?
Today, no one questions digital photography. In fact, the “purists” of today are the ones using Lightroom and Photoshop to heavily color-grade their RAW files. The tool that was once considered the assassin of the art form is now the standard-bearer of the industry. The “cheating” became the workflow.
The Sampler: The “Talentless” Musician
I survived the photography purge only to enter a new battleground in my senior year. I started making music.
A few years into my musical journey, I got my hands on an Akai MPC 2000. For the uninitiated, this is a legendary sampler and sequencer. It allowed me to take snippets of vinyl records—a drum break from a funk track, a horn stab from a jazz record—and re-pitch, chop, and sequence them into something entirely new.
I was ecstatic. I was creating rich, textured soundscapes that I physically couldn’t play on a piano.
Then came the musicians. The guys with the guitars and the years of music theory.
“That’s stealing,” they sneered. “You aren’t playing the instruments. You’re just pressing buttons. You’re taking someone else’s work and pasting it together. You aren’t a musician; you’re a collage artist. A thief.”
They told me that because I didn’t spend ten years learning to pluck the bass strings exactly like the funk player on the record, my output had no value. They ignored the rhythm, the swing, the ear for melody, and the arrangement. They focused entirely on the mechanism of creation rather than the result.
Fast forward to today. Hip-hop and electronic music—genres built entirely on the back of sampling and “button pushing”—are the dominant musical forces of our culture. The MPC is an instrument as respected as the Stratocaster. We realized that curation is a form of creation. We realized that synthesis is art.
But back then? I was just a cheater.
The 3D Revolution: “Letting the Computer Draw”
My career eventually led me into graphic design and the world of 3D. I dove deep into heavy-hitters like Houdini and Blender.
If you know Houdini, you know it is less like drawing and more like programming. You build node networks. You create procedural systems. You don’t “sculpt” a rock; you create a noise algorithm that generates a rock based on parameters you define.
Once again, the traditional illustrators came for me.
“You didn’t draw that,” they said, looking at a photorealistic render of a landscape. “The computer calculated the light. The computer calculated the shadows. You just set up the scene and hit render. It’s soulless.”
They looked at the result of hours of math, physics simulation, and aesthetic judgment, and reduced it to “letting the computer do it.”
Do you see the pattern yet?
The Invisible AI You’ve Been Using for a Decade
Now, we arrive at the present day. The same people who eventually accepted Photoshop, accepted Sampling, and accepted 3D are now drawing the line at Generative AI. They scream that AI is “predictive,” that it’s just “algorithms,” and that it “steals from real artists.”
Here is the cold, hard truth that nobody wants to admit: If you have used a computer to make art in the last ten years, you have already been using AI.
You just didn’t call it that because it was helping you, not threatening you.
- Photographers: When you use “Subject Select” in Photoshop, what do you think is identifying the subject? That is machine learning. When you use “Content-Aware Fill” to remove a trash can from a beautiful landscape, the computer is hallucinating pixels that were never there based on the surrounding data. That is generative AI.
- 3D Artists: When you use a denoiser to clean up a render so you don’t have to calculate as many samples, an AI is guessing what that image should look like.
- Videographers: When your camera uses “Eye-AF” to lock onto a pupil, an AI is decoding the visual field in real-time.
We have been standing on the shoulders of algorithms for years. We happily handed over the tedious parts of our workflow to the machine. We let the computer handle the math, the focus, the noise reduction, and the color matching.
But now that the computer is offering to handle the composition or the rendering, suddenly it’s a moral crisis?
The hypocrisy lies in the arbitrary distinction of how much help is too much. It is acceptable for the computer to calculate the bounce of light in a 3D scene (which would take a human a lifetime to calculate manually), but it is unacceptable for a computer to calculate the arrangement of pixels in a 2D image?
The Supply Chain of Art: Standing on Shoulders
Let’s strip this down to the studs. The core argument against AI is usually about “effort” and “originality.” The claim is that AI prompters are lazy and relying on the work of others (the training data).
But let’s look at the “Real Artists.”
The Painter:
Does the painter grind their own pigments? Do they mine the lapis lazuli? Do they grow the flax, harvest it, spin the thread, and weave the canvas? No. They buy a tube of paint and a pre-stretched canvas from an art supply store. They are relying on the industrial supply chain—the work of chemists, factory workers, and logistics experts—to provide them with the tools to create. They are standing on the shoulders of others.
The Photographer:
Does the photographer understand the Bayer filter on their sensor? Did they solder the circuits? Did they write the demosaicing algorithm that converts raw voltage data from photosites into a viewable JPEG?
No. A team of engineers at Sony or Canon did that. The photographer frames the shot, but the creation of the image is a massive technological collaboration between the user and thousands of invisible engineers. The sensor “decodes” real life. The photographer just points it.
The 2D Concept Artist:
This is the group most vocal against AI right now. Yet, look at the workflow of a modern concept artist. They use “Photo-bashing.” They take photos of tanks, textures of rusty metal, and stock images of skies, and they layer them together, painting over the seams.
They use 3D assets they bought from a marketplace. They use brushes created by other artists. They use reference images—literal pieces of other people’s art—to guide their lighting and anatomy.
They are not creating from a vacuum. They are assembling pieces.
So, why is it “art” when a human manually collages stock photos in Photoshop, but “theft” when an AI collages patterns in a latent space?
Where is the Line?
This is the question that destroys the anti-AI argument: Where is the line?
If using a tool to make the process easier disqualifies it as art, then we should all be drawing with charcoal we burned ourselves on cave walls.
- If Photoshop is cheating, go back to the darkroom.
- If the darkroom is cheating, go back to painting.
- If buying paint is cheating, grind your own.
- If using reference is cheating, close your eyes.
The line is arbitrary. It is a moving goalpost that the current generation uses to gatekeep the next generation.
The “Real Artist” has never been defined by the difficulty of their process. Art is not an Olympics of suffering. If I spend 100 hours pushing a peanut across the floor with my nose, it is difficult, but it isn’t necessarily art. Conversely, if a photographer captures a history-changing image in 1/8000th of a second, the brevity of the effort does not diminish the impact of the art.
The Fear of Obsolescence
Let’s stop pretending this is about “soul” or “theft.” This is about fear.
When I used Photoshop in ’96, the darkroom purists were afraid their skills were becoming obsolete.
When I used the MPC, the instrumentalists were afraid their dexterity was becoming less valuable.
When I used Houdini, the illustrators were afraid their hand-skills were being outpaced by proceduralism.
And now, with AI, the digital artists are afraid. They spent decades mastering the technical friction of their tools—learning how to navigate menus, manage layers, and simulate lighting. AI has removed the friction. It has democratized the ability to visualize an idea.
That is terrifying. I get it. I have been on the receiving end of that fear my whole life.
But fear does not give you the right to define what art is.
The New Avant-Garde
I am now being told that because I type a prompt or train a LoRA model, I am not an artist.
But I look at my workflow. I am curating. I am iterating. I am refining. I am having a conversation with a complex, chaotic tool to pull a specific vision out of the ether.
Is it different from painting? Yes.
Is it different from traditional photography? Yes.
Is it less valid? No.
We are entering an era where the barrier between imagination and image is dissolving. The technical skills of “how to hold the brush” are being replaced by the conceptual skills of “what to paint.”
The critics are right about one thing: AI creates a lot of garbage. But so do humans. For every Mozart, there are a million terrible garage bands. For every Ansel Adams, there are a billion blurry iPhone photos. The presence of low-effort work does not negate the medium.
Conclusion
I have been a “fake” artist for thirty years. I have cheated my way through Photoshop, stolen my way through sampling, and procedurally generated my way through 3D.
And do you know what? I created things. I moved people. I built a career.
To the artists currently standing at the gates, pitchforks in hand, screaming at the incoming tide of AI: You are standing on the shoulders of the “cheaters” who came before you. You are using tools that were once called demonic. You are the beneficiaries of the very automation you now claim to hate.
The medium is not the art. The tool is not the artist.
The art is the vision. And whether that vision is captured on silver halide crystals, sampled from a vinyl record, or hallucinated by a neural network, the only thing that matters is the feeling it evokes.
So, call me a hypocrite. Call me a fake. Call me a button-pusher. I’ll be over here, creating the future, just like I was in 1996.