AI Art Exploration

As a designer and artist, I’ve spent years sharpening my craft, so I was hesitant to embrace AI art for a long time. Honestly, I’m late to the party. AI visuals have often been dismissed for looking unnatural, soulless, and riddled with quirks, which discouraged me from exploring the space—I assumed the limitations would outweigh the possibilities.

Recently, though, I came across a few online creators producing stunning, highly aesthetic art with AI. They shattered my preconceptions of what AI could achieve, inspiring me to give it a try myself.

In just a few days, I found myself hooked, using every spare moment to create something new.

A New Process and Skillset

This process feels entirely new to me. While the output is visual—something I’m deeply familiar with—it demands a very different skillset.

I’ve learned that crafting prompts requires precision and balance. The instructions need to be vague enough to allow creative freedom, but not so vague that the AI takes a completely unintended direction. There’s also a technical side: understanding how parameters influence the output and searching for reference codes that shortcut my way to the styles I envision.

It’s both exciting and challenging—a blend of creativity and problem-solving unlike anything I’ve done before.

How Worried Am I About AI Replacing Creatives?

Moderately.

AI makes it remarkably easy to generate plausible art, but creating something with soul and meaning is another matter entirely.

As a product designer, my work goes beyond making things visually pleasing. I aim to express ideas and emotions through art, and handing over full creative control to AI feels unfulfilling to me.

That said, if my role were more heavily reliant on visuals alone, I’d likely feel more pressure. Even then, I’ve found AI tools aren’t quite ready for prime time in a commercial setting. Fine-tuning the visual direction and details is far more painstaking than I anticipated. Often, I want to tweak an image in a specific way, only to find the tools can’t accommodate my needs—tasks I could easily handle if I created the art myself. Still, I’m sure these gaps will close as the technology evolves.

Bottom Line

My relationship with AI art will evolve, just as the technology itself will.

I believe in the “know your enemy” philosophy—not that AI is an enemy, but whether I choose to embrace it or keep my distance, understanding it deeply is essential. Ultimately, it’s up to me to decide whether AI-generated art is something I want to claim as my own and be proud of.