The lights shut off, and the crowd finds their seats as they prepare to watch what they assume is just a whimsical kids production at their small local theater. As the show begins, the music creeps in, and the kids come out singing in front of an artificial-looking backdrop that appears to have never been touched by human hands. I can’t believe my eyes.
For months, I saw a theater advertising a kids production using lines like, “come be part of the world they’re creating.” I couldn’t help but notice the irony in that statement when they chose to forgo creativity and rely on lazy alternatives, like a sloppy backdrop “created” by artificial intelligence.
At intermission, the theater displayed art examples drawn by the kids for the backdrops. I was confused by the decision to drop the kids’ hand-drawn art for something they didn’t create.
The kids did a fantastic job combatting the poor creative decisions made by the production organizers. The production itself was adorable, and that couldn’t be taken away by anybody.
AI has waged war on more than just small theaters. AI has continued to develop and become a hot topic in national politics; hard questions regarding its place in our society remain unanswered. Arguments for AI usage in other fields are understandable to me, but the debate over whether it has a place in art or not is ridiculous.
AI generates art through collecting millions of examples throughout the internet and using aspects from everything it gathers to create an image. In other words, AI is incapable of creating original content.
In 2024, cartoonist Sarah Andersen and a handful of other visual artists filed a class-action lawsuit against Stability AI after they unlawfully stole billions of copyrighted images off of the internet to train their AI art generator.
The lawsuit has yet to reach a conclusion, and evidence is still being gathered for the case. Artists are now fighting for a place in their own field, with AI quickly invading their domain.
This isn’t the first time Stability AI has seen lawsuits.
In 2023, Getty Images took Stability AI to the High Court of England and Wales, accusing Stability of taking millions of watermarked and copyrighted images without permission to train the Stable Diffusion AI model. In 2025 the English High Court ruled in favor of Stability AI.
Amidst the lawsuits and usage of AI in local theaters, some artists are still considering AI a viable creative option.
In a press release written by American artist, Craig Boehman in December 2024, he stated: “It’s not only about convenience. For me, at the heart of it, it’s about expression and intention.” AI was never supposed to be convenient, and expression and intention are not generated, they are created.
Boehman continues to express little concern with the changes that could be made to the job market, mentioning that he is aware that AI may take jobs. He argues, “Unfortunately and fortunately, time moves on. We’re all subject to these forces of change.”
Artists face a lot of challenges when competing with AI, but what scares me the most is there seems to be no sense of urgency from those around me.
The lack of concern from the attendees at the small local kids production, as well as Boehman’s response to AI’s potentially taking of jobs, raises questions over how normalized generative AI has become.
I rebuke the AI invasion over the arts, and I urge everybody to reconsider it’s role in our society. Artificial intelligence never has and never will have a place in art.
