Recently, a local collaboration between a major apparel brand and a popular F&B company sparked a heated debate in creative circles.
The campaign, which featured AI-generated art on promotional merchandise, led to widespread criticism from industry professionals. Many were upset that prominent brands would opt for an algorithm over human illustrators, especially given their significant resources.
As a founder who has championed illustration for a decade, I deeply understand that frustration. Most people vocalizing their anger that brands should engage real artists are, naturally, from the creative industry. But here’s the tough truth: for the majority audience, no one cares. They don’t even know it’s AI. And with AI art getting more seamless every day, it’s becoming incredibly difficult to spot for the untrained eye.
This forces us to ask a difficult question: Why aren’t brands engaging illustrators for these projects?
In my experience, the decision is rarely singular. It’s a confluence of factors:
Time, Aesthetic, and Money
- Time: Sometimes, these high-profile collaborations materialize at the last minute. The required turnaround time, less than three weeks is simply not enough for artist selection, budget approval, production, and delivery. The timeline alone often pushes brands toward instantaneous solutions.
- Aesthetic: Brand stakeholders might not know which artist suits a campaign. Often, the style seen in these AI-generated campaigns is very generic and lacks a personal identity. Brand owners are sometimes actively seeking that neutral, “generic style” because the artists they encounter often have too strong a personal flair. They either haven’t been exposed enough to enjoy illustration styles outside of the generic AI aesthetic, or they simply value safe uniformity.
- Money: While I don’t believe cost-cutting is always the primary driver, many clients face relentless demands for monthly or weekly campaigns. They lack the budget or the resources to plan two months ahead for a unique illustration that only lasts thirty days. For them, stock images were the best choice yesterday; AI art is the best choice today.
When we rage about brands not using human artists, we often frame it as the brand underappreciating our work. But, deep down we rage out of fear,the fear of losing our livelihood.
However, the immediate “victims” aren’t us; they are the artists who made their living from stock images. Their work was fed to the training models, and clients are now opting for instant AI generation instead of purchasing a subscription to their libraries.
We will only be out of a job if we continue to produce the “generic artwork”, the kind of work that can be generated from trained art.
My prediction is that AI art will eventually hit a plateau. It can only rearrange what has already been created. It is us the human artists who will continue to come up with fresh ideas, pairing them with our singular personal flair.
Brand owners will never publish a limited-edition collaboration and proudly announce it was created by an AI. They will always prefer to leverage the human artist and their creation story because that is where the soul and value lie.
We are in a new era, and AI is simply a tool meant to change the way we make art. Artists shouldn’t spend time “rendering” photorealistic art; we should spend more time exploring the subject we want to convey, using AI to handle the rendering or to test different layouts instantly, keeping our creative momentum high.
My ultimate dream is to have an easy-to-use personal neural network that is trained only on our own unpublished work, a private tool we use to try out ideas and possibilities, not a public library we compete with.
Art is not just about the skill; it is the thinking. AI art is soulless, and it is our job to make art that carries our soul. In this era, we must stop creating repetitive, generic-looking artwork, as those pieces will be replaced by AI in a split second.
When the mechanical press made it possible to print decorative images cheaply, the Scribes and Illuminators (artists who specialized in hand-drawn books) saw their market evaporate. They feared for their jobs because they were paid for reproduction. Yet, this technology ultimately freed the artist to become a pure creator, leading to the rise of great printmakers like Dürer, who leveraged the new technology to become famous.
We stand at a similar precipice today. Our value isn’t in the execution of the generic, but in the ingenuity of the concept.
— Lai
