(This is the ninth in a series on generative AI content.)
Lately, it seems every week brings a new wave of AI-generated content: a dreamy forest “in the style of Miyazaki,” a detailed character portrait that could’ve been pulled from a professional illustrator’s portfolio, or some whimsical creature with “Ghibli vibes.” Now, with ChatGPT’s latest rollout of built-in image generation tools, the process is easier and more frictionless than ever. No training. No drawing. Just type a prompt, and BOOM—you’ve got “art.”
And people are cheering. “Look what I made!” “Anyone can be an artist now!” “This is the future!”
But let’s be clear: this isn’t a great day for artists. It’s a great day for erasure.
To many artists, especially those working in visual storytelling, animation, concept design, and illustration, these AI “milestones” don’t feel like progress. They are a form of theft. Hayao Miyazaki’s hand-drawn aesthetic—delicate, deeply personal, shaped by decades of work—is now a preset. Countless independent artists have watched their styles, developed over years of trial, failure, and refinement, become data points fed into black-box models that churn out shallow imitations.
And while the people pushing these tools cheer, calling it “democratization,” what they’re actually celebrating is the flattening of human creativity into an algorithmic aesthetic machine. The real tragedy? Those claiming to now be “artists” because they can generate an image with AI are proving the opposite. They’re not elevating themselves—they’re diminishing what artistry actually means. The increase in new “artists” over the last two days showing off how they too can “do Mikazaki” are proving their parasitic dependence on real human artists.
To real artists, this isn’t just about style or aesthetics being copied. It’s about something much more personal being violated. For many, their work, whether it’s their living or not, is not just a product. It’s a piece of themselves. Their lines, their colors, their characters, their visual language—these are expressions of identity, emotion, memory, and lived experience. When an AI model trained on scraped datasets spits out knockoff versions of that work, it’s not flattery. It’s not progress. It’s a theft of something intimate, and it’s horribly violating.
It’s hard to overstate how invasive that feels. Imagine spending years developing a style that reflects how you see the world, only to see it reduced to a promptable effect—instantly accessible to anyone who’s never picked up a pencil. The machine doesn’t understand the pain behind a piece, or the joy, or the hours it took to learn how to render form, light, and motion. It just spits out an approximation, a hollow echo.
And then come the people who rush to claim authorship as their very own. “I’m an artist now,” they say, because they typed the right string of words. But that claim reveals more than they realize. What they’re doing isn’t creating—it’s selecting. Consuming. Mimicking. They’re making the case, unintentionally, that they were never artists to begin with. They never valued the process, only the product.
Meanwhile, those whose styles are being mined and imitated—those who create for unpaid joy as well as living, working artists—are being pushed further to the margins. Their portfolios are being turned into training data as they lose work…and AI creates very few jobs for these artists to move into. Their visual identities are being worn like costumes. And those cheering this on as a kind of revolution seem willfully blind to the cost. This isn’t “democratization.” It’s displacement.
And the speed of AI creation only makes this worse. The immediate generation of visual content by people who don’t want to learn, but want the praise of creating has led to a flood of AI-generated images overwhelming platforms like Pinterest and DeviantArt. AI art is posted at rates so high, so constant, that actual human artists are getting buried. It’s become increasingly difficult to even find work by real people. The humans are nearly silenced—not by lack of skill or vision, but simply because they cannot produce at the inhuman pace AI enables.
And no, this isn’t just nostalgia for the old ways. Artists aren’t resisting innovation—they’re resisting being exploited. They’re resisting a system that treats their labor as free raw material, their identity as aesthetic fodder, and their careers as acceptable casualties in the name of “progress.”
Being an artist isn’t just about creating a pretty image—sometimes the result isn’t pretty at all. It’s not about matching someone else’s style or getting likes. Art is process. It’s discipline. It’s a point of view, a relationship to the world, a confrontation with form and meaning. It’s something cultivated, something earned, not summoned with a prompt. When AI can mimic “your style” in seconds, what’s revealed isn’t that AI is brilliant. It’s that the people using it to bypass effort were never interested in the art to begin with.
This doesn’t mean people can’t or shouldn’t experiment with new tools. But we need to be honest about what’s happening. Most AI models are trained on mass quantities of work pulled without permission from artists who now see their labor devalued in real-time. The ability to “do Miyazaki” isn’t magic. It’s the commodification of stolen identity.
The truth is, this isn’t about fear of new tools—urine certainly isn’t new (and urinating itself doesn’t mean you’re created art). It’s about the gutting of meaning. Because when you strip away authorship, context, emotion, and craft, what you’re left with isn’t art. It’s image-making without soul. It’s the appearance of creativity without any of the vulnerability, humanity, or risk that makes art matter.
And to those gloating about this as a triumph, something that’s going to “disrupt the industry” or “tear down the gatekeepers”: consider what you’re actually cheering for. You’re not smashing the system. You’re celebrating the replacement of skilled, passionate humans, many who work independently, with machines that don’t understand, don’t feel, and never cared because you don’t want to make the effort to learn.
So no, this is not “a great internet day.” It’s a day when real people’s work, voices, and identities are being fed into machines and rebranded as “everyone’s.” It’s a day when the people who give art its heart are being told they’re obsolete. And it’s a day when those who have never known what it means to create are confusing convenience with talent
If the future of art is built on stolen style and soulless imitation, maybe it’s not a future to celebrate. Maybe it’s time to stop cheering and to start listening to the people whose voices are being drowned out beneath the noise.
