AI and the Artist: This Door Opens Both Ways
- Avon Waters
- Apr 11
- 4 min read
Every artist I know is talking about AI. The debates are everywhere: fight it, use it, or ignore it and hope it disappears. You can't scroll through an artist forum, open social media, or sit down with a group of painters without the conversation turning to it. Even news podcasters weigh in — the disruptions ahead, the jobs at risk, the sense that society isn't prepared for what's coming.
Here's what I keep coming back to: AI is not going away. No amount of wishing by artists or art event organizers will change that.
We've Been Here Before
I love reading history, and I can't stop noticing how often the present rhymes with the past. My undergraduate experience was in Fine Art Photography and we all debated photography’s place in the art world that the gatekeepers continued to exclude.
Well before our debates, photography faced the same wall at it’s inception. Edward Weston, Alfred Stieglitz, Wynn Bullock, Ansel Adams — these photographers spent careers fighting for their work to be recognized as art. I remember a time in the 1970s when photographers still had to mount their own exhibitions because fine art juried shows routinely excluded them. Most galleries and museum spaces wouldn't touch art photography.
Photography wasn't going away. Today those same institutions collect and exhibit it right alongside paintings, drawings, and every other so-called accepted medium.
And yet here we are, seeing juried show prospectuses that exclude AI — or any use of AI during any part of the creative process. We have learned nothing.
What the Camera Actually Did
The deeper lesson from photography isn't about acceptance. It's about what photography freed painters to do.
The Impressionists understood this from the inside. Once a machine could capture reality, painters no longer had to. That liberation didn't diminish painting — it opened a door to something richer. Painters could leave the obligation to record behind and pursue instead the poetry of art-making: light as feeling, color as emotion, experience rather than documentation.
Their work was rejected. Society wasn't ready. But eventually it capitulated, as it always does with the Post-Impressionists, the Fauves, the Expressionists — every movement that arrived with a new vision met resistance, and every one of them was eventually absorbed.
The camera pushed painters from recorders to poets. That much most artists know.
What I didn't fully understand until recently was what AI is pushing us toward next.
The Essay That Stopped Me
Earlier this year I came across a new essay by painter Deborah Scott titled The Reluctant Philosopher "Photography made painters into poets. AI is making painters into philosophers." I haven't been able to stop thinking about it since.
Scott draws a distinction that cuts right to the heart of what makes AI different from every disruption that came before it. Photography, she argues, challenged painting at the level of recording. AI challenges painting at the level of authorship and meaning.
A generative image doesn't just capture — it feels meant. Atmosphere, mood, narrative, intention. On a screen it can carry the same apparent weight as a painting built on years of studio practice. And today, most people will never stand in front of most paintings they encounter. They see the work on a screen, and on a screen, visual impact no longer proves a person made it.
That is a different kind of threat than the camera posed. The camera competed with the painter's hand. AI competes with the painter's mind.
Scott's response to this condition — her own framework, which she calls Structural Omission — is built around something no algorithm can replicate: perceptual limits. The gaps she builds into her paintings aren't stylistic. They reflect her actual experience of partial seeing, of not being able to take in the whole scene, of not knowing what comes next. A generative system can produce images that look like those gaps. It cannot produce the reason they're there, because it has no blind spots. It has no body standing in a room, failing.
But the part of her essay that landed hardest for me was this: she argues that writing is now part of the work. Not artist statements, not secondary commentary — but proof of human inquiry that travels with the image everywhere the image travels. Brushwork proves you were present when someone stands in front of the canvas. Writing proves you were present when they're looking at a screen.
What I Recognized in Myself
Reading Scott's essay, something clicked into place about my own recent work.
For a while now I've been painting the air around things rather than the things themselves. I didn't have a full framework for why. I just knew that full rendering felt increasingly false to what I was actually experiencing in the studio — that the space between objects, the atmosphere, the suggestion of presence rather than its declaration, was where the truth of the painting lived.
Scott gave me language for what I was already doing. And more than language — she gave me a direction.
If AI can generate images thick with expression and emotion, then making more expressive, emotional images isn't the answer. The answer is to make work that asks why it exists — work that carries evidence of a thinking, limited, embodied human who stood in front of a set of decisions and made them for reasons no prompt could produce.
That isn't poetry. Poetry evokes. Philosophy interrogates.
The Door That's Opening
I'm not planning to make art with AI. But I am planning to let this moment do what the camera did for the Impressionists — free me from one obligation so I can pursue something harder and more honest.
The artists who will matter in this next chapter won't be the ones who resist AI or the ones who out-generate it. They'll be the ones who use this disruption as an invitation to go deeper: to build work that questions its own existence, to write alongside their paintings as part of the practice, and to make something that only a person with a body, a biography, and genuine blind spots could have made.
AI is not closing doors for visual artists.
It's showing us which ones were always meant to be walked through.
A note on sourcing: Deborah Scott's essay — "The Reluctant Philosopher: Photography made painters into poets. AI is making painters into philosophers" — was published March 1, 2026, and is available with full citation at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18825668. Well worth reading in full.
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