The Battle for Artistry
Art has always been an important part of human's existence. Art can communicate a lot of things like stories, emotions, experiences, and even as a show of competence. It is exactly why I feel very odd seeing the current artistic landscape, as of writing this in first quarter of 2026. Art and artists are actually being…
Undervalued,
Unappreciated
And most importantly…
Treated as a product/machine to make said product.
I mean, I've read on how the animation studio MAPPA, the studio well known for making Chainsaw Man and Jujutsu Kaisen, is infamously known to overwork and underpay their animators, to the point where one of them couldn't go home for three days…
Or about the Marvel Studios layoffs, that fired around 1000 staffs and was a couple percentage of the company…
Or how animators are experiencing unstable careers and job insecurity…
Or, what's the most heartbreaking to me as a gamer, the insane culture that the gaming industry adopts, which includes everything the package has to offer like layoffs (even when the game is a hit btw), being underpaid, being overworked (especially the extended crunches, somehow the gaming industry loves crunches), and even sometimes not leaving the office for days.
Though it seems now, this problem is creeping even outside of corporations and to the individuals, with the introduction of…
Generative AI
The introduction of GenAI has riled the world up. I still remember once it was called revolutionary, but now it seems that it is a dying thing that’s trying so hard to keep itself alive. Ever since it's first introduction, it has flocked people, back then some artists and some not, to try and generate art such as writing, illustration, even videos when it later came out.
Unsurprisingly, it was really bad. Though fast forward only a couple of years, the program that was at first prospected as a tool soon turned into a threat. I remember seeing people creating services to generate images using AI in Fiverr. Now, though, there seems to be a rise in AI gen scam, theft, and an overall increase of underappreciation of artists by opting to use AI generated content instead.
Why All This is Happening
Personally, I think the problem is caused by three factors:
Capitalism (duh). Companies focus too much on monetary value than artistic value,
Low appreciation of art and artists, which I think is connected with the rise of capitalism ideas as we focus more on efficiency (like the rise of brutalism architecture), and
The false satisfaction of fulfilling your beauty and self-expression needs that GenAI gives.
I do think point number three is really important here. Based on Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, we all have a need of beauty, competence, and self-expression (as part of self-actualization). I believe that low appreciation of art happens due to the current societal structure that focuses more on efficiency, hence suppressing our needs of beauty and self-expression.
GenAI though gives people an easy access to feel that competence, to fulfill that expression needs, and get that beauty need fulfilled easily without having to brutally learn art or expense funds to commision artists.
How Will it End?
I think that in the end there will be two major groups of people in the artistic landscape: the Art Purist and “Generatist”.
The Art Purist are the ones who aren't supressing their beauty needs and sees the value in working hard to achieve competence and self expression. They will have a higher appreciation of art, and would probably not see things in terms of efficiency. Some part of this group would probably have a negative impression towards anything labeled AI, more so if it's labeled as a “tool”. Genuine AI tools in the future, if there's any, would probably be harder to promote to this people and they're probably not be the first adopters. I also think that these people would form a community and/or communities that would support each other's creation, creating individual or small scale businesses, and would probably anti big corporation.
The “Generatist” group is the one who'll have a lower appreciation to art. They would have the mindset of “good enough” in art and be more focused on efficiency of production, hence probably a more business minded approach when it comes to art. This group is likely to be first adopters of new AI tech, but not ones that are truly tools because they won't have the skills of art making, hence would probably stay in generative AI apps.
The trend is definitely not looking good for GenAI, especially the publicly published ones. I have seen news about GenAI being used in sorting potatoes and detecting tumors early on, but it would seem that so far, GenAI has no place in the artistic world, whether it be games, images, writing, or music. It begs the question, what will the “Genarist” group do if GenAI really falls off? Will they learn art? Will they cling to GenAI till it's last breath? Or will they just go back before GenAI exist and just not engage with art anymore?