Sizing up A.I.-created art at Christie’s auction house in New York in February. The pieces sold together for $94,500. Angela Weiss/AFP via Getty Images

Debate Can A.I. Replace Artists?

September 22, 2025

Think of the last time you created a work of art—a drawing, a painting, or maybe a poem, short story, or a piece of music. How did you do it? Could a robot have done it equally well?

As artificial intelligence has advanced, it has begun to replace some human artists in areas such as graphic design, video game programming, and illustration. Some say A.I. can work as creatively as humans, inspire new ideas, and eliminate some of the more tedious creative tasks that artists have long performed.

But others believe that human effort is the essence of art. An artist, they say, sets out to convey an idea, a feeling, or a shared experience—motivations entirely lacking in a robot. By this standard, art produced with A.I. is cold and uninteresting, devoid of real feeling.

Can A.I. really replace artists? Two illustrators face off on the question.

A.I. can replace artists, and it’s already happening. A.I. is making it possible for anyone to make art, and that’s changing the way we think about art—and how we value it.

We used to believe that art could only be created by skilled artisans—people who could, say, draw or paint. But now anyone with a computer can make art that rivals anything made by a human artist. With A.I. programs like DALL-E and Midjourney, you can create beautiful images in just seconds. You’ve probably encountered these kinds of images in video games and books, but they’re also in galleries in London and New York, which are selling them as fine art. Even ancient art forms are changing: The Italian start-up Robotor uses A.I.-driven carving machines to create sculptures that, to all appearances, could have been shaped by the hands of Michelangelo.

A.I. has already started replacing artists in the creative industries or changing the way they work. Programs like ChatGPT are writing articles, books, and scripts for videos. While a human might still edit these texts, the computer does the essential work of thinking and composing. Amazon has experienced a flood of new A.I.-generated books, the Authors Guild reports, and people are buying them up.

A.I. will replace some artists but make others more creative.

Companies are using A.I. to save time and money. Coca-Cola used A.I. last year to create festive scenes and music for its Christmas commercial, eliminating the need for artists, designers, filmmakers, writers, and musicians. Production took 2 months rather than the usual 12 and saved thousands of dollars in artist commission fees.

People have been using tools to create art ever since the first of us drew with charcoal on a cave wall. A.I. is our latest tool. It will replace some professional artists, but it will make other artists more creative: Writers, for example, will also become designers and illustrators—and vice versa. It will expand human creativity, allowing us—any of us—to create whatever we can imagine.

—TED LEONHARDT
Creative career consultant and former illustrator

Art is a deeply human endeavor. It’s about translating something you feel inside into something tangible. And it’s not just the final product that’s important: Whether it’s illustration, music, writing, or sculpture, true art is rooted in the creative process. You start with a blank canvas, and through instinct and experimentation, you fill it with something surprising and uniquely yours. Pressing a button to generate an image is not a creative process. In fact, it’s just the opposite.

A.I. could never create original art. It generates artwork by trawling the internet, aggregating millions of existing images and repackaging the product as something new. Sure, human artists are influenced by other artworks too, but there’s a crucial difference: Artists bring memory, emotion, even imperfection to the process. When I reference the painter David Hockney’s style in my work, I’m not copying brushstrokes. I’m recalling a feeling, a half-remembered palette, something filtered through my own lived experience. That’s where originality lies.

A.I. reduces art to a mere product.

A.I. strips that soul out. It reduces illustration to a mere product, devaluing a craft that too many people already undervalue. It encourages people to believe that their A.I.-generated image is equivalent to work created through years of practice and trial and error. But it isn’t. Look at any image made with A.I. It might look pretty at first, but it’s a shallow impersonation—like being promised tickets to a Taylor Swift concert only to discover it’s someone doing a karaoke version of “Cruel Summer.”

Humans, especially children, have a natural impulse to draw. It’s how we explore and understand the world. We mustn’t suffocate that impulse for the sake of convenience or a quick fix. Could A.I. be a useful tool for creating art? Sure. But a replacement for artists? Never. Art isn’t an algorithm. It’s human. It’s fun. And it’s irreplaceable.

—ROB BIDDULPH
Children’s book author and illustrator