Struggling AI Artist

A Response to Christoph Niemann's article about A.I. and creativity published in the New York Times Magazine

by Timothy Coleman - 29/Jun/2025

Intro

A friend recently sent me a post on Instagram by Christoph Niemann which features a short excerpt of Christoph's essay – featured in the New York Times Magazine – about AI and creativity. I was going to respond to them, but realised my response would be too long – and hopefully interesting enough – so I decided to turn it into a blog post.

Christoph starts out by outlining two urgent points of discussion about AI:

1. Economics and whether people will still be able to make a living making art (post the invention of AI).
2. Is AI good or bad for the creative process.

About Me

A bit about me: I'm a software engineer and technical product manager who has worked in tech for over a decade. Before that, I was studying Interactive Media at university (in both the UK and San Francisco), before that I studied: 1 year of art, photography, english language, ceramics (AS Levels); 2 years of music technology (BTEC); 2 years of performing arts (BTEC). So I'm pretty qualified to comment on the intersection between art and technology.

But am I an artist? Good question! Which brings us back to the age old question of 'what is art?'

When I was creating art at college and univeristy, I would start off with a piece that inspired me, try and learn how to recreate it, and then create something new from my own mind in a similar style. That didn't mean I was plagurising the original piece, rather, that I was inspired by it. The new piece was my own original 'art'.

New Art Forms

When NFTs became a thing, I was deep in the Web3 sector of emerging tech.

Blockchains are probably way worse for the environment than AI by the way, but are arguably necessary because we can't seem to trust strangers, and payment providers take way too much commission as a percentage of transactions.

I was going to a few NFT meetups around that time, and co-ran one of the first NFT galleries in the UK just after covid.

The discourse was very similar at that time about whether NFTs were technically 'art' or not. The idea was good though, digitising your work and selling it as a transferrable digital token promised to give artists a fairer fee for their work, and platforms like OpenSea opened up artists' work to a global marketplace.

Ultimately though, this technology ended up being co-opted people looking to make a quick buck, and became saturated with auto generated pictures of apes selling for tens of thousands of dollars (but at least you got to be part of an exclusive club if you had one).

Thank goodness NFTs were invented BEFORE AI generated art eh..

Back to Cristoph

Anyway, back to Cristoph's piece.. he says:

Shouldn't artists have the right to stop their work from being used to build the systems that destroy their livelihood?

Answer: well this is exactly what is happening on the internet, much more content is being put behind paywalls (OnlyFans for example) for this exact reason, you just gotta trust the company creating the paywall not to use/sell your art to companies for training AI models.

Who wouldn't want to just tell a machine what you want, sit back and receive a finished artwork in seconds?

Answer: well, it doesn't quite work like that. I have been creating AI generated pieces based on myself, which took a really long technically complicated process of creating a Digital Twin/Deepfake of - a younger version - of me. AI generated output based on this digital-understanding-of-who-I-am is rarely without the need for a lot of manual photoshop/postproduction editing (especially when it is video output). Thankfully I learned how to use Photoshop, video and 3D tools etc at university.

[AI] works well for variations of an existing idea.. But for now, it struggles at making a truly original leap

Answer: well thank God for that, otherwise AI would be sentient (which it isn't).

AI bases its picks on what's most prevalent in its training data [and is] compromised by a plethora of biases

Correct (Ask most LLMs like ChatGPT to give you a 'random' number betwen 0 and 25 and they will say 17).

Even if these issues can be solved, the biggest challenge is that writing an AI prompt requires the artist to know what he wants. If only it were that simple.

Correct. That is why you still need someone who understands domain specific language when using AI, otherwise you get hallucinations.

Cristoph then goes on to talk about how real art is communicating emotions from person to person, and says about how this leads to love letters, doodles and some paintings in museums. Interesting that artists like Damien Hirst (the richest living artist in the UK with an esstimated wealth of $384 million), have – or so I've been told – made so much of their wealth from 'art' – the value of which – has been boosted by wash trading (PLEASE read up on that if you don't know what it means).

Summary

Cristoph ends his piece with this:

Automating the creation of art is like automating life, so you can make it to the finish line faster.

And this is probably the only part I really disagree with. Sure I hear the concerns about work being taken and reproduced, but if you plagiarise something by copying and pasting, or take a photocopy, it's the same.

AI systems just learn patterns and are able to understand high level concepts like what a cat is, or what renaissance style is, which allows me - using my digital twin model - to create a derivative picture of myself in a renaissance style with a cat.

It is still my art (it was not created using any online tools), and I'm sure the heritage funds who benefit from paintings done by their ancestors hundreds of years ago don't mind me – possibly semi-plagiarising? - their dead ancestors' styles of work (it's not like they probably need the money).

No doubt Christoph was paid for his piece – or is at least able to monetise his 1.1M-follower-strong Instagram account in some ways. I wrote this piece in a pub near my house using the last £1.50 in my account to pay for a lime and soda so that they don't kick me out. Now I will be going off to manually edit some frames of an AI generated video (of myself) because the autogenerated output wasn't perfectly what I wanted:

AI GENERATED WORK DOESN'T REMOVE THE NEED FOR MANUAL WORK

The Rupert Murdochs of the world will keep trying to argue that AI 'freerides on valuable content') whereas I will keep trying to do something unique and different, even if it means I'll forever be a struggling AI artist.