The Art That A.I. Cannot Make – A Ramble

Well, since I’m still in the mood for writing about A.I, I thought that I’d talk about the art that A.I. cannot make. I am, of course, talking about art that has personal meaning and/or art based on personal experience. Art where you are very specific about what it should be.

This was something I ended up thinking about in very early January after I saw my reflection in a Christmas tree bauble and just had to make a quick and undetailed semi-digital painting of it. It won’t appear here properly until next year, but here’s a preview of part of it:

The full semi-digital painting should hopefully be posted here in late April 2025.

And, along with how my fan art sketchbook seems to have turned into more of an “art diary” where I can record daydreams and make introspective art, I suddenly realised that A.I. cannot do any of this. It cannot make this sort of hyper-specific personal art because the number of creative decisions available to you is much more limited if you use an A.I. instead of making the art yourself.

You can write a prompt, but it’s up to the A.I. to interpret it and – 99.9% of the time – it will look different to what you saw, thought or imagined. This is because you can’t carefully draw every line, can’t choose which details to focus on or a hundred other small decisions that are part of the process of making art yourself.

You can tell an A.I. the general idea, but it has a different “imagination”, different sensibilities and different “experiences” to you, so it won’t look like what you really want to draw or paint.

Yes, it might give you a general approximation, but it won’t be exact. The best metaphor is probably a typical action videogame shotgun. In videogames, shotguns are often designed to be “powerful but inaccurate” for game balancing reasons. If you need to frantically obliterate a monster or henchman who is literally right in front of you, then the shotgun is often the quickest and strongest choice.

But, if you need to aim at something very specific, then it’s usually better to switch to the sniper rifle instead, which is usually designed to be “slow but accurate”. And this is a great metaphor for human-made art vs “A.I. art”.

If you need something quick, powerful and inaccurate – to satisfy curiosity, to swiftly record general moods/ideas etc.. – then using the “shotgun” of A.I. to churn out a few photo-realistic images in about a minute will probably suffice.

But if you want to turn a hyper-specific thing you’ve seen in real life into art, or if you want an accurate record of a cool daydream that you’ve had or something highly specific like that, then switch to the precise “sniper rifle” of a good old-fashioned pen, pencil, brush or stylus instead of blundering around with an A.I. – because A.I. isn’t very good at precisely re-creating what is either right in front of your eyes or within your own unique imagination.

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Anyway, I hope that this was interesting 🙂