It’s been long enough now, here in spring of 2026, that we can look at the tools being mounted, and the world being created, and make an assessment. Not a guess, anymore, but a straight-up mean look into the open mouth of LLMs. AI’s headlong, off-the-rails and rampant adoption by various people, various companies, various political groups. Most of these entities want to have something essentially immediately, without the associated costs and labor of having someone create it. Some just want to automate tasks that computers ought to be doing anyway. But in any case, no matter what the intention, here is what is clear: anything that we make from here on out, as long as it is on the internet, will be subsumed into AI models and smudged out of existence.

This was an unwelcome time for this to happen. I have spent the last decade re-learning how to create artwork, how to see and how to show you what I see. Knowing how to do that is very central to an artist, being able to take thoughts and make them exist in real life as sculpture, jewelry, prose, marks of ink on the paper. Digital marks on digital paper. Improving craft, making mistakes, failure informing future successes. Experimentation.

Artwork has long been an underappreciated part of living in a modern society. We almost expect our cities to have some artwork in them (the more the better!), whether that artwork is landscaping, architecture, murals, public squares, sculptures. Even back in 2020, there was an absolute plethora of artwork to soak in from the very existence of the internet. All of our weird people met one another and created communities, you can find artwork of anything you WANT to. And if it does not exist, you can for sure get someone to make it for you. It’s easy.

So what are we replacing that with?

It’s hard for me to argue that it’s very easy for someone to AI prompt their flyer for a one-off event. I cannot even blame them; after all, this is an amazing tool. They ask and the AI creates. You can have expectations, but it is clear that there are some limitations to what the software can produce or understand. We forgive it, after all, it’s not like they could draw anything like this, and it looks good enough. The AI slop gets posted, it is indeed good enough for maybe 80% of people. The world turns.

So what I am arguing for? More posters, and facebook flyers, and daily special gig work for starving artists?

I cannot help but wonder how many artists would have never lifted a pen if they had access to the brain rotting AI. It does to the brain what giving a child everything they want (with no limitations) will do to discipline. You get a reward, but you didn’t actually DO anything to get the reward. Your ability to ascertain your work from another’s work is eroded.

Some of this is not even new phenomena! People have been tracing famous artists, and photoshopping, and straight-up stealing art for a very long time! The difference now is that the stealing is absolutely total, impossible to measure. The people who are ruined home computing, privacy, and affordable RAM have already scoured the internet for your thoughts and identity. Everything I make, every sentence I write, every piece of art I share with the world, goes straight into the machine. Spit in the ocean, wind in the breeze, thank you for training our LLM.

For the rest of our lives, for the rest of all of our lives and our children’s lives, we will have to ask ourselves ‘ is that real?’ when seeing any image. Pictures from your childhood. Your wedding. Your camping trip. A drawing from a favorite artist. Doesn’t matter what it is; if the internet is feeding you an image your first thought is ALWAYS going to be ‘is that AI?’. Have you tried looking for specific references to any animals, flowers, or character’s lately? Getting a primary source is almost impossible these days. They take a million pictures of roses and then rearrange them a billion times, so when you image search for ‘roses’, what you get is fake AI roses. What a computer has been trained to think a rose is, and what it has been trained to show you when you ask for a picture of a rose. You need to hunt, BEG the internet into giving you the real deal.

So I still draw a lot. I keep it in sketchbooks and on large pieces of paper. I make rings and earrings and I work on metal alloys. I keep things real, where I am. Because here is what has really been taken away from us: I cannot look at art and feel the human behind it anymore. I cannot trust it.

I had a friend with whom had planned on working on some artwork together with at some point. They got really, really into AI, and using it as a method of communication. Their reasoning is that people lie X percent of the time, and the AI is wrong (lies) X percent of the time, therefore they chose the AI. How do you say anything to that? Once I asked point blank if they were using AI to communicate with me, and they asked why that was even an issue, I had to take a step back and ask what was going on. Why would I read something you didn’t write? Why would I look at artwork that you did not create? And why would I buy from you something which you clearly do not own?