Artificial intelligence and art: a decisive moment?

Is artificial intelligence a threat or an opportunity for artists? This question is, in reality, not equally relevant to painters, photographers, digital artists, illustrators, designers, visual effects artists, and game designers. Each of these fields interacts with technology differently. Among the disciplines, photography is arguably one of the most affected by this revolution. Observing the effects of AI on it is particularly interesting, given that photography itself once represented a point of rupture in art history.

Until the 19th century, artists used their eyes, hands, and imagination to represent the world. From cave paintings to Renaissance masterpieces, from oil on wood to charcoal on paper, their role was to capture life – or visions of life.

Everything changed with the invention of photography which introduced a mechanical way to capture reality. For the first time, light itself could "paint" an image on film. This technological leap sparked a heated debate: Would photography kill the traditional role of artists?

In some ways, it did. Cameras took over many of the social functions that artists had historically performed. For example, portrait painting – until then reserved for the wealthy – became democratized.

But the arrival of photography didn’t destroy art. Instead, it transformed it. Artists responded by pushing the boundaries of their medium. Movements like Impressionism, Cubism, and Surrealism emerged partly as reactions to photography. Rather than competing with cameras to reproduce reality, artists began exploring new, expressive ways of seeing the world. They focused on mood, emotion, abstraction, and imagination.

Photography itself eventually became recognized as a form of fine art. What started as a mechanical process turned into a creative one, as photographers developed their own aesthetic visions.

Today, we are witnessing a similar moment of technological disruption – but this time, AI is at the centre of it. It is poised to reshape photography and image-making in ways that are just as profound as photography’s impact on painting in the 19th century. AI can now generate images of people, places, and scenes that never existed. Companies can even create entire advertising campaigns using virtual models – no photo shoots required.

Stock photography websites are already filled with AI-generated images. Landscapes, interiors, city streets, sunsets… many of these “photos” are no longer captured with a camera but conjured up by algorithms.

Is this replacing fine art photography? Not exactly. AI isn’t producing the kind of conceptual or emotionally resonant work you’d see in art galleries or photography festivals. But it is now displacing some of the everyday functions of photography.

A traditional camera lens gathers light from a single scene at a specific moment in time. It records reality directly onto film or a digital sensor. AI, by contrast, gathers light from billions of images already captured by humans. Its “lens” is made up of data. AI systems break these images into small pieces (visual tokens) and learn how they relate to words and descriptions (language tokens). The AI essentially learns the visual language of the world.

Thus, the artificial generation of images becomes a second-order derivative of reality. Cameras capture reality directly. AI reinterprets reality through the filter of billions of past images and human language. That’s why AI-generated images often feel familiar yet otherworldly: they’re stitched together from the collective memory of the internet.

These new technologies offer unprecedented possibilities. A camera is bound by the real world. It can only capture what physically exists in front of its lens. But AI is not tethered to reality in the same way. Instead, it mixes and matches elements from countless sources to produce entirely new scenes. It can create images of places that have never existed, people who were never born, and moments that never happened. This combinatorial imagination allows it to generate visuals beyond the limitations of the real world – a power that transforms image-making into a kind of synthetic dreamscape creation.

The other fundamental shift is how we control the process. With a camera, you shape an image by selecting a scene, adjusting your lens, and pressing the shutter. With AI, the lens is replaced by language. Through text prompts, you can specify the composition of a scene, dictate the lighting, evoke a mood, or even simulate the properties of a specific lens. This process, sometimes referred to (somewhat misleadingly) as prompt engineering, has become a new creative skill. 

Of course, this introduces new limitations. AI-generated art is constrained by language; it can only create what you can effectively describe. Words are powerful, but they’re not always precise enough to capture the nuance of a visual idea.

Photography is arguably the art form most vulnerable to AI disruption. Even before AI’s rise, many photographers struggled with the oversupply of images in the digital age. Now AI threatens to automate much of the work that was once the domain of photographers – especially in commercial fields like stock photography, portraiture, and product imaging.

But at the same time, many digital artists see AI as a powerful new tool rather than a threat. These artists, comfortable working with digital technology, seize the new opportunities to speed up repetitive tasks or generate ideas they can refine and develop further.

Today’s artificially generated images may not always meet the high standards of professional visual effects or game design. However, the technology is improving fast. It’s easy to imagine a future where AI becomes an indispensable part of the creative toolkit for artists in these fields.

Just as photography freed painters from the obligation to reproduce reality, opening the door to new artistic movements, AI may free a new generation of artists from the constraints of the physical world.

Because ultimately, it’s artists who make art. The difference lies in intention, meaning, and interpretation. It takes human creativity to turn AI outputs into something that resonates on an emotional or cultural level.

The role of the artist isn’t disappearing, it’s simply evolving. We are at the beginning of a new chapter in art history, where imagination, technology, and human creativity intersect in ways we’re only beginning to understand.