Is AI Generated Art Gross?

In today’s technology landscape, we’re constantly seeing headlines about AI taking jobs and rendering humans obsolete. Whether those predictions ultimately prove true or not, the disruption is already happening. Major companies like Amazon, Meta, and Oracle have all announced large-scale layoffs while simultaneously investing heavily in artificial intelligence.

Large language models like ChatGPT and Claude are becoming remarkably effective at automating tasks that once required specialized human labor. In some cases, they can even generate the very code used to build software platforms themselves. But while automation is one thing, creativity is another entirely — and that’s the question I find myself thinking about most.

The Rise of Generative AI

Over the last few years, AI models have been trained on massive amounts of human-created art, music, photography, writing, and video. These systems ingest enormous libraries of creative work, analyze patterns, categorize visual and sonic information, and build mathematical relationships that help them “understand” how humans create and communicate.

The result is a new generation of tools capable of generating images, videos, music, lyrics, voice performances, and even cinematic sequences from a simple text prompt. Platforms like OpenAI, Gemini, and Suno are making creative production more accessible than ever before.

Naturally, this raises a difficult question for artists and media professionals:

If anyone can type a prompt into an AI tool and instantly receive content for their project, what happens to professional creatives?

The Reality of the Market

The truth is that every market eventually develops segments, and AI-generated art will be no different.

There will always be a high-end market for people seeking originality, exclusivity, and artistic identity. At the same time, there will also be a budget market focused on speed, convenience, and affordability.

Fashion is a good example.

Luxury brands like Versace thrive because people value the vision, taste, and cultural identity behind the work. On the other hand, companies like Uniqlo or Gap serve a broader audience with affordable, functional designs meant for mass appeal. Both markets exist successfully side by side, but they serve completely different purposes.

AI-generated art feels similar.

Most public AI platforms are trained on the collective history of human creativity. Because of that, the outputs are inevitably influenced by existing artistic styles, structures, and trends. Over time, much of the generated content starts to feel familiar. It may be impressive at first glance, but familiarity is the enemy of originality.

That’s where the limitations begin to matter.

If everyone has access to the same tools and can generate similar-looking images, music, or videos, then creative differentiation becomes harder. For filmmakers, composers, game studios, advertisers, and brand marketers, differentiation is everything. Unique intellectual property is what creates long-term value.

And today, copyright around AI-generated content remains legally and ethically complicated.

That’s why I believe many public generative AI platforms will primarily serve general-purpose creative needs: social media posts, explainer videos, birthday montages, quick concept art, marketing drafts, temporary content, and hobbyist projects. In those situations, generic imagery and background music are often perfectly acceptable.

But for organizations trying to build iconic brands, unforgettable characters, emotionally resonant stories, or culturally meaningful art, “acceptable” usually isn’t enough.

Where Human Creativity Still Wins

The most innovative creative work rarely comes from recombining what already exists. It comes from lived experience, emotional context, risk-taking, and perspective.

For the foreseeable future, human creatives still hold the advantage in those areas.

AI can imitate aesthetics remarkably well, but creating something genuinely new is different from remixing patterns at scale. Developing compelling characters, inventing new visual languages, capturing authentic performances, or building emotionally layered stories still relies heavily on human intuition and lived experience.

That doesn’t mean AI has no place in professional creativity. Quite the opposite.

I think AI will become an incredibly valuable utility tool within creative industries. It can automate the repetitive production tasks that most artists never enjoyed doing in the first place:

• Cleaning audio

• Resizing assets

• Translating dialogue

• Organizing footage

• Removing backgrounds

• Generating rough storyboards

• Assisting with animation workflows

• Speeding up editing pipelines

But the core creative direction — the original spark — still matters most. That’s the part audiences emotionally connect with, and it’s the part that remains hardest to automate.

The Future May Belong to Private AI

One of the most interesting possibilities is that large studios, production houses, musicians, and artists may eventually train private AI models exclusively on their own intellectual property.

Instead of relying on public systems trained on the entire internet, creators could build AI tools tailored specifically to their own worlds, characters, aesthetics, voices, and production pipelines.

Actors might license digital versions of their likenesses. Musicians could train custom vocal or compositional models on their own catalogs. Animation studios could accelerate production while still maintaining creative ownership and stylistic consistency.

In that future, AI becomes less of a replacement for artists and more of a force multiplier for existing creators.

Because realistically, the average user probably shouldn’t be able to type “Give me Mickey Mouse riding in a horse-drawn chariot” into a public AI tool and generate Disney-owned intellectual property on demand.

But Disney themselves? They’ll almost certainly use AI internally to accelerate parts of their own production process.

That distinction matters.

The real competitive advantage won’t simply come from using AI. It will come from owning the underlying intellectual property, training data, creative vision, and custom workflows that shape the output.

And despite all the hype, AI-generated results are rarely perfect on the first attempt. Or the tenth. The magic often comes from iteration, refinement, curation, and creative judgment — which are all deeply human skills.

So… Is AI Generated Art Gross?

Honestly, I don’t think AI-generated art is inherently “gross.”

But I do think it raises uncomfortable questions about originality, ownership, authorship, and creative value. Some AI-generated work feels hollow because it skips the human struggle, experimentation, and lived experience that often give art its meaning in the first place.

At the same time, every major technological shift in creative history has sparked fear. Photography threatened painters. Digital recording threatened analog studios. CGI threatened practical effects. Yet human creativity adapted every single time.

AI will absolutely change the creative industry.

Some jobs will disappear. New ones will emerge. Certain types of content will become commoditized. But I don’t believe human creativity itself is going away anytime soon.

If anything, originality may become even more valuable in a world flooded with generated content.

But that’s just my perspective. I’d genuinely love to hear yours.