"Pick Up A Pencil"? Shove It Up Your Ass
Every time AI comes up in art spaces, the same ritual unfolds. A chorus of people rushes in, cloaked in concern—about ethics, about artists, about the environment, about surveillance. It’s always framed as moral seriousness, and it almost always collapses into the same thing: smug scolding aimed downward.
So let’s talk about the anti-AI greatest hits, and why I’m not buying what they’re selling.
So let’s talk about the anti-AI greatest hits, and why I’m not buying what they’re selling.
“It’s All Stolen Art”
This one usually arrives first, delivered with maximum confidence and minimal understanding.
AI training is not meaningfully different from how humans learn to make art. That’s not a metaphor; it’s literally how art education works. In school, my art classes had us replicate famous paintings—Van Gogh, Monet, the usual canon—not to pass them off as our own, but to learn composition, color, and technique. Nobody accused us of stealing Van Gogh. We were learning visual language.
Human artists absorb thousands upon thousands of images over their lives. Styles, motifs, conventions, influences—all of it gets internalized, often unconsciously. Training is a process. Plagiarism is an output. Confusing the two is either ignorance or bad faith.
Nothing I create using AI is plagiarized from anyone. It doesn’t resemble a specific artist because I’m not asking it to. AI outputs are shaped by prompts, constraints, and intent. If you have an actual vision—as opposed to “make this look like that popular thing”—you can produce work that doesn’t look like anyone else’s. AI doesn’t replace creativity; it reveals whether there was any to begin with.
If learning from existing art were theft, every art school on Earth would be a crime scene.
The “stolen art” argument gets especially hollow when you look at who’s making it.
Many of the loudest anti-AI voices work in highly codified styles—anime being the most obvious example—where influence from specific creators and studios is not only normal but expected. Studio Ghibli alone has shaped an entire visual ecosystem. No one pretends those artists are working in a vacuum, and no one accuses them of theft for participating in a shared visual language.
And then there’s fanart-for-commission.
If you are charging money to draw characters owned by Nintendo, Sega, Disney, DC, Marvel, Cartoon Network, the Tolkien Estate, or anyone else, you are monetizing someone else’s intellectual property. That’s not a moral judgment; it’s just a fact. Yet this practice is broadly accepted, even celebrated, while AI art that produces original images untethered to specific copyrighted characters is treated as uniquely unethical.
If we’re being honest about where the ethical gray areas actually are, this argument falls apart fast.
AI training is not meaningfully different from how humans learn to make art. That’s not a metaphor; it’s literally how art education works. In school, my art classes had us replicate famous paintings—Van Gogh, Monet, the usual canon—not to pass them off as our own, but to learn composition, color, and technique. Nobody accused us of stealing Van Gogh. We were learning visual language.
Human artists absorb thousands upon thousands of images over their lives. Styles, motifs, conventions, influences—all of it gets internalized, often unconsciously. Training is a process. Plagiarism is an output. Confusing the two is either ignorance or bad faith.
Nothing I create using AI is plagiarized from anyone. It doesn’t resemble a specific artist because I’m not asking it to. AI outputs are shaped by prompts, constraints, and intent. If you have an actual vision—as opposed to “make this look like that popular thing”—you can produce work that doesn’t look like anyone else’s. AI doesn’t replace creativity; it reveals whether there was any to begin with.
If learning from existing art were theft, every art school on Earth would be a crime scene.
The “stolen art” argument gets especially hollow when you look at who’s making it.
Many of the loudest anti-AI voices work in highly codified styles—anime being the most obvious example—where influence from specific creators and studios is not only normal but expected. Studio Ghibli alone has shaped an entire visual ecosystem. No one pretends those artists are working in a vacuum, and no one accuses them of theft for participating in a shared visual language.
And then there’s fanart-for-commission.
If you are charging money to draw characters owned by Nintendo, Sega, Disney, DC, Marvel, Cartoon Network, the Tolkien Estate, or anyone else, you are monetizing someone else’s intellectual property. That’s not a moral judgment; it’s just a fact. Yet this practice is broadly accepted, even celebrated, while AI art that produces original images untethered to specific copyrighted characters is treated as uniquely unethical.
If we’re being honest about where the ethical gray areas actually are, this argument falls apart fast.
The Environmental Hand-Wringing (Selectively Applied)
Next comes the concern-trolling about AI’s environmental impact.
Yes, environmental impact matters. What doesn’t matter is selective outrage. Many of the people screaming about AI’s energy use order from Amazon, eat factory-farmed meat, replace electronics constantly, and stream media endlessly, and travel to other states or other countries at least once or twice a year. Somehow those impacts are treated as background noise, while AI is framed as uniquely catastrophic.
The environmental costs of AI are often flattened into social-media talking points stripped of nuance. Energy use does not automatically equal unethical use. If you only care about the planet when it gives you a convenient way to yell at people, that’s not environmentalism—it’s posturing.
Yes, environmental impact matters. What doesn’t matter is selective outrage. Many of the people screaming about AI’s energy use order from Amazon, eat factory-farmed meat, replace electronics constantly, and stream media endlessly, and travel to other states or other countries at least once or twice a year. Somehow those impacts are treated as background noise, while AI is framed as uniquely catastrophic.
The environmental costs of AI are often flattened into social-media talking points stripped of nuance. Energy use does not automatically equal unethical use. If you only care about the planet when it gives you a convenient way to yell at people, that’s not environmentalism—it’s posturing.
Let's Talk Some More About Those "Ethics"
When Andy and I were active on DeviantArt, before we finally shut off comments, we could reliably expect at least one anti-AI troll a week—often more. This was despite the fact that our work was clearly labeled as AI-assisted, and despite DeviantArt offering filters specifically designed to suppress AI content if you don’t want to see it. These people didn’t stumble across our work by accident; they went looking for it.
And it’s worth noting that the very first threats I ever received on that site—including “I’m going to find out where you live” and outright death threats—came from self-styled anti-AI “artists” who believed harassment and intimidation were an appropriate response to tools they personally dislike.
There was also a grimly consistent pattern to these accounts: the people screaming loudest and thinking they had the right to harass and threaten us, almost always had galleries full of extremely poor hand-drawn art, much of it clearly done in MS Paint, with little grasp of anatomy, composition, lighting, or color. At a certain point, it became impossible to take the accusation seriously. Whatever they were reacting to, it wasn’t some principled stand for artistic integrity—it was resentment. Calling our work “soulless” (among other things) was a convenient lie, a way to dress up envy and insecurity as moral critique, especially when the hostility seemed driven less by anything we had made than by the fact that we had a clear, cohesive vision and were actually bringing it to life.
And it’s worth noting that the very first threats I ever received on that site—including “I’m going to find out where you live” and outright death threats—came from self-styled anti-AI “artists” who believed harassment and intimidation were an appropriate response to tools they personally dislike.
There was also a grimly consistent pattern to these accounts: the people screaming loudest and thinking they had the right to harass and threaten us, almost always had galleries full of extremely poor hand-drawn art, much of it clearly done in MS Paint, with little grasp of anatomy, composition, lighting, or color. At a certain point, it became impossible to take the accusation seriously. Whatever they were reacting to, it wasn’t some principled stand for artistic integrity—it was resentment. Calling our work “soulless” (among other things) was a convenient lie, a way to dress up envy and insecurity as moral critique, especially when the hostility seemed driven less by anything we had made than by the fact that we had a clear, cohesive vision and were actually bringing it to life.
Surveillance Panic From People on DeviantArt and Social Media
Another favorite move is invoking Palantir, government surveillance, and corporate overreach.
Here’s the thing: surveillance did not begin with AI. If you’re posting this argument on DeviantArt, X, Facebook, Instagram, or Tumblr, you are already participating in platforms built on data harvesting and corporate-government entanglements. AI didn’t invent this ecosystem. It entered one that already existed.
If you’re worried about surveillance, that concern is valid—but pretending AI is the singular villain while happily using surveillance-driven platforms is incoherent.
Here’s the thing: surveillance did not begin with AI. If you’re posting this argument on DeviantArt, X, Facebook, Instagram, or Tumblr, you are already participating in platforms built on data harvesting and corporate-government entanglements. AI didn’t invent this ecosystem. It entered one that already existed.
If you’re worried about surveillance, that concern is valid—but pretending AI is the singular villain while happily using surveillance-driven platforms is incoherent.
The Classism and Ableism of “Just Learn to Draw”
This is where the anti-AI rhetoric stops being merely tedious and starts being ugly.
“Just pick up a pencil and learn to draw” is not empowering advice. It’s exclusionary. Art supplies are expensive. Time is a privilege. Physical ability is not universal.
I am a real artist. I painted. I did photomanipulation. I’ve had work shown in galleries and have taken commissions, back in the 2000s and early 2010s. I didn’t turn to AI because I couldn’t make art. I turned to it because my body changed. I have Ehlers-Danlos and arthritis, and over time painting became physically painful and increasingly impossible. My vision didn’t disappear. My tools did.
My partner Andy has dyspraxia. Fine motor control is not evenly distributed among humans. Not everyone can “just practice” their way into traditional art skills, no matter how badly they want to.
Even setting disability aside, there are hard technical limits to what I can do with traditional painting and photomanipulation compared to what I actually see in my head. My older work always fell short—not because I lacked effort or imagination, but because the tools and techniques available to me simply couldn’t bridge the gap between vision and execution. I’ve always thought in terms of fully realized worlds, cinematic lighting, realistic textures, and complex atmospheres, and translating that by hand was an exercise in compromise. AI is the first tool I’ve ever used that comes close to bypassing that bottleneck, letting me get nearer to a direct translation of what’s in my mind into a finished image. It’s not about laziness or shortcuts; it’s about finally having a way to externalize a vision that was always there. Andy feels much the same way about his own art.
AI lowers barriers. It lets disabled and working-class people create without asking permission from gatekeepers who have decided what counts as effort. A lot of anti-AI rhetoric is just ableism and classism dressed up in politically correct language.
“Just pick up a pencil and learn to draw” is not empowering advice. It’s exclusionary. Art supplies are expensive. Time is a privilege. Physical ability is not universal.
I am a real artist. I painted. I did photomanipulation. I’ve had work shown in galleries and have taken commissions, back in the 2000s and early 2010s. I didn’t turn to AI because I couldn’t make art. I turned to it because my body changed. I have Ehlers-Danlos and arthritis, and over time painting became physically painful and increasingly impossible. My vision didn’t disappear. My tools did.
My partner Andy has dyspraxia. Fine motor control is not evenly distributed among humans. Not everyone can “just practice” their way into traditional art skills, no matter how badly they want to.
Even setting disability aside, there are hard technical limits to what I can do with traditional painting and photomanipulation compared to what I actually see in my head. My older work always fell short—not because I lacked effort or imagination, but because the tools and techniques available to me simply couldn’t bridge the gap between vision and execution. I’ve always thought in terms of fully realized worlds, cinematic lighting, realistic textures, and complex atmospheres, and translating that by hand was an exercise in compromise. AI is the first tool I’ve ever used that comes close to bypassing that bottleneck, letting me get nearer to a direct translation of what’s in my mind into a finished image. It’s not about laziness or shortcuts; it’s about finally having a way to externalize a vision that was always there. Andy feels much the same way about his own art.
AI lowers barriers. It lets disabled and working-class people create without asking permission from gatekeepers who have decided what counts as effort. A lot of anti-AI rhetoric is just ableism and classism dressed up in politically correct language.
“AI Is Putting Real Artists Out of Business”
This argument rests on a fantasy version of the past.
It has always been brutally difficult to make a living as an artist. Long before AI existed, most artists were underpaid, under-recognized, and scrambling. Very few people have ever made a stable income from art alone, and pretending there was once a golden age where talent reliably paid the bills is historical fiction.
One of the few places where AI-generated images can be sold without DeviantArt-style social transactions (see below) is stock art. And yes, people love to point to that as proof that AI users are cashing in.
Here’s the reality: stock art is wildly oversaturated. You have to produce enormous volumes of images, and only a tiny fraction will ever sell—and when they do, they sell for peanuts. It’s a numbers game, not an artistic one. And by definition, it’s stock: generic, interchangeable, made to disappear into advertisements, websites, and book covers.
That’s not what I’m here to do.
I’m not interested in churning out visual filler. I’m here to bring specific worlds, creatures, and atmospheres to life—the things I see in my head and have spent decades imagining. AI is a tool that lets me do that now, not a shortcut to some imaginary pile of money.
As a disabled person trying to survive on a very limited income, would it be nice to make a little extra money from art? Absolutely. And I tried. For close to a year, I made a sincere effort to sell work on DeviantArt, and the results were, frankly, miserable.
Not because the work was bad, and not because people weren’t looking—but because selling art on DeviantArt has almost nothing to do with art. It’s about visibility games, social transactions, reciprocal buying, and staying in the right circles. It’s exhausting, and it’s especially punishing if you’re disabled, low on energy, or simply unwilling to treat creativity like a popularity contest.
And here’s the part the “AI is killing art” crowd never seems to understand: I still make art now.
I’m not being paid for it. I’m not chasing commissions. I’m not feeding algorithms. I’m not even posting it on social platforms anymore. I’m here, on my own website, making the things I feel compelled to make because the act of creating them matters to me. Because bringing these worlds and creatures into being is part of how I stay sane, engaged, and alive.
That’s what art actually is. Not a hustle. Not a revenue stream. Not a fragile marketplace that collapses the moment the tools change. Art is the thing you keep doing even when nobody is watching, even when there’s no money in it, even when the only reward is the work itself. It's about expressing yourself, exploring the multitudes that live inside you.
The people screaming the loudest about “making a living” from art will never understand this, because for them, art was never the point. The economy around it was.
It has always been brutally difficult to make a living as an artist. Long before AI existed, most artists were underpaid, under-recognized, and scrambling. Very few people have ever made a stable income from art alone, and pretending there was once a golden age where talent reliably paid the bills is historical fiction.
One of the few places where AI-generated images can be sold without DeviantArt-style social transactions (see below) is stock art. And yes, people love to point to that as proof that AI users are cashing in.
Here’s the reality: stock art is wildly oversaturated. You have to produce enormous volumes of images, and only a tiny fraction will ever sell—and when they do, they sell for peanuts. It’s a numbers game, not an artistic one. And by definition, it’s stock: generic, interchangeable, made to disappear into advertisements, websites, and book covers.
That’s not what I’m here to do.
I’m not interested in churning out visual filler. I’m here to bring specific worlds, creatures, and atmospheres to life—the things I see in my head and have spent decades imagining. AI is a tool that lets me do that now, not a shortcut to some imaginary pile of money.
As a disabled person trying to survive on a very limited income, would it be nice to make a little extra money from art? Absolutely. And I tried. For close to a year, I made a sincere effort to sell work on DeviantArt, and the results were, frankly, miserable.
Not because the work was bad, and not because people weren’t looking—but because selling art on DeviantArt has almost nothing to do with art. It’s about visibility games, social transactions, reciprocal buying, and staying in the right circles. It’s exhausting, and it’s especially punishing if you’re disabled, low on energy, or simply unwilling to treat creativity like a popularity contest.
And here’s the part the “AI is killing art” crowd never seems to understand: I still make art now.
I’m not being paid for it. I’m not chasing commissions. I’m not feeding algorithms. I’m not even posting it on social platforms anymore. I’m here, on my own website, making the things I feel compelled to make because the act of creating them matters to me. Because bringing these worlds and creatures into being is part of how I stay sane, engaged, and alive.
That’s what art actually is. Not a hustle. Not a revenue stream. Not a fragile marketplace that collapses the moment the tools change. Art is the thing you keep doing even when nobody is watching, even when there’s no money in it, even when the only reward is the work itself. It's about expressing yourself, exploring the multitudes that live inside you.
The people screaming the loudest about “making a living” from art will never understand this, because for them, art was never the point. The economy around it was.
What This Is Really About
When you strip away the concern-trolling, what people are actually mourning isn’t art. It’s control. A fragile hierarchy that already excluded disabled people, poor people, and anyone unwilling or unable to play social games for scraps of visibility.
AI didn’t kill art. It challenged who gets to make it—and that’s what scares people.
AI didn’t kill art. It challenged who gets to make it—and that’s what scares people.
