Let’s get one thing straight: when people say “AI makes art more accessible,” what they really mean is, “I didn’t want to put in the effort, so I typed a sentence and called it creativity.”
For centuries, art has been a process, often slow, difficult, and deeply human. Learning anatomy, understanding light, and building a style — these are not barriers to accessibility. They’re the very bones of artistic expression. But in the age of AI, all that is being tossed out in favour of instant gratification and zero skill.
And apparently, pointing that out is gatekeeping.
Toby Bond is a solicitor with Bird and Bird international law firm, and has worked with clients on both sides of this debate with AI and legislation.
“I think the view that AI is a general threat to human creativity and artistic endeavour contains an incredibly cynical view of human nature, people are inherently creative and people will use the tools that are available to create and I think that’s part of human nature
“I have personal experience of working with creatives who have found huge benefits from AI technology. I’ve done some work for a digital artist who generates beautiful artworks by fine-tuning AI image generators to create a particular style and aesthetic.”
Anthony Downing is an artist based at Kite studios in Kellum Island and don’t think AI art is any real threat to the creative side.
He said: “I just don’t see that it’s really that good or that it has the same effect that you get from something which has had the human heart and hand put into it, which creates something unique.”
AI art defenders claim they were “locked out of the art world” before AI came along. But is it really a lack of access, or is it a lack of patience and effort? I hate to admit it, but maybe we are proving the boomers right.
Toby said: “if you look at the advent of photography, one view would render drawing and painting entirely irrelevant …That’s not what happened. Drawing and painting evolved into abstract forms of expression and continued to be incredibly valued by our societies and photography itself became a creative endeavour where people use it to express themselves in incredibly beautiful and original and expressive ways.”
This is a common defence of Ai but the click of the camera still required the skill, input and artistic perception of the human mind.
I just can’t help but think Art is one of the few things that have always been accessible if you put in the effort. Tutorials are free. Pencils are cheap. YouTube is overflowing with beginner guides. People can sculpt with rubbish, paint with egg yolks and flowers, Monet was colour blind, for crying out loud, but a corporate sleaze or jealous neck sitting at his computer, sipping at his monster will tell you you can’t and that this sleazy shortcut is your only route.
According to ITU 2.7 billion people in the world don’t have internet access, is it more accessible for them?
AI is a tool, many advocates say, like a paintbrush, except this paintbrush takes the work of a thousand real artists, many of whom never agreed to be scraped into a dataset and uses it to turn a profit without giving them any credit or compensation.
It’s not a tool, it’s a shortcut — one that cuts through ethics, originality, and the messy joy of figuring things out for yourself. And let’s be honest: a lot of people praising AI “art” simply want a way to skip the part where they had to suck at something first.
Wanting the arts to be more accessible is absolutely a noble thing, but if your idea of “accessible” is “I didn’t have to try,” then congratulations, not only are you an idiot, but you don’t want art, you want content. True accessibility means actually working to provide resources, education, and opportunities for diverse voices to make things.
Sara Prinsloo is an artist based in Sheffield who has produced an eclectic collection of vibrant, humorous and punchy artwork.
She said: “I don’t think it makes it more accessible…It devalues it , it’s more like oh, i can do that in a second, and then does it devalue our artwork because of that. Is it less respected? The craftsmanship that goes into making something.”
The online AI community constantly belittles the value of the arts and creative industries, but the truth is people still innately admire the skill it takes to make something. AI just allows people to play dress-up as creatives while ignoring the time, skill and labour behind real work.
“Again this is all my personal opinion. I do think some of the negative reaction is a perception that it’s cheating. People feel that it’s cheating. I think it’s you’re achieving a result that usually would take years of training and skill and effort so I do understand that reaction to AI art as the feeling of like you found a shortcut but that’s a sort of short-term view and that’s sort of akin to saying isn’t it a bit like using a calculators cheating because I’m really good at long division. ” Bond said.
But Prinsloo believes the time and effort is where the value lies.
“It takes time, materials, cost money and it’s not just producing it’s the ideas and the thought process” she said.
Although Bond believes tf AI can be a positive tool for artists, the value still comes from human input.
He said. “What people value is the expression of a human personality in content and I think just typing the word cat into an image generator and generating a picture of a cat like that doesn’t have much value at all really to people…Whereas someone who spent lots of time tuning a model to create a particular style, they were just using the AI as a tool to express their personality. That has value because it’s got some human creation in it.And it’s just mediated through a new technology.”
In today’s consumer-driven world, we’re often focused solely on the final product, rarely pausing to consider the process behind it—unless it’s explicitly pointed out to us, and even then, it’s easy to dismiss it as preachy or pretentious (which, admittedly, it sometimes is). But art, like fashion or food, is just the visible endpoint of a much longer journey. Most of us don’t think about where our clothes come from, who grows our coffee or harvests our cocoa and now, with AI entering the creative space, we’re being asked to question another process—but will we?
