Even as A.I.’s integration into daily life continues, visual artists remain divided over a central question: is its use legitimate in artistic creation? Other creative sectors—including video production, graphic design, photo editing, fashion design, architecture and product design—have grown increasingly open to integrating A.I. into workflows. In most cases, artificial intelligence serves as an assistant: facilitating brainstorming, generating alternatives, organizing information or streamlining the more tedious technical aspects of the creative process. The emerging consensus, even in the visual arts, seems to be that A.I. can be a valuable tool, but should never generate the final product. The real debate, then, is not over whether artists and creatives should use A.I., but over what kinds of use are legitimate.
A.I.-generated images and videos, for now, tend to be easily recognizable and attract plenty of backlash, particularly in creative communities, even as a broad cross-section of the public appears increasingly willing to accept them (or progressively more disinterested in making a distinction). When Coca-Cola released its first A.I.-generated Christmas advertisement in 2024, many viewers criticized it as soulless and emotionally hollow. The company used artificial intelligence again in 2025, and again faced a wave of criticism. By then, however, audiences had become more accustomed to A.I.-generated content’s presence in digital advertising. Meanwhile, concerns about copyright and authorship infringement, the erosion of creativity, skills and freedom, and job-market disruption remain insurmountable without national or international policies that protect creators and users.
In the art world, adoption of A.I. has been considerably slower. Only recently have we begun to see meaningful integrations, primarily on the administrative side, in software and platforms designed to streamline gallery operations, studio management and collection database administration. As a recent First Thursday survey revealed, most galleries still lack formal policies governing A.I., and employees are often dealing with sensitive information using personal accounts.
The broader discussions around artificial intelligence and culture are also evolving. UNESCO’s latest report on A.I. use, for instance, acknowledged it as a form of collective intelligence shaped by decades of digitally mediated social interaction and cultural production. Beyond the necessary ethical and ecological concerns raised by the document, if these systems can also be understood as repositories of the “creative commons”—humanity’s shared cultural record—then creators may be able to engage with them as tools for research, dialogue and critical confrontation, situating their practices within the history of cultural expression.
A recent essay in Aeon by critic and philosopher Martin Puchner, Professor of Drama and of English and Comparative Literature at Harvard University, considers similar questions from the perspective of writing and the humanities. Addressing what he describes as widespread “creative resistance” to A.I., Puchner argues that these systems should primarily be understood as tools. He describes A.I. as a kind of “shared language model,” trained on knowledge encoded in language itself. Language, after all, is one of humanity’s earliest technologies, fundamentally reshaping how we think and communicate. Today, Puchner suggests, we share that linguistic space with machines that can expand our expressive, creative and intellectual capacities. He, like many educators across the humanities, is exploring ways to integrate A.I. into teaching and argues that developing what he calls “meta-AI” skills—the ability to use evolving tools critically and effectively—is essential not only for the future workplace but also for enhancing writing and thinking. Used as “sparring partners,” A.I. systems can inspire students to sharpen arguments, responding to counterarguments and conflicting evidence, while also serving as research assistants or collaborators in testing structures and approaches.
Among artists, particularly those working in traditional media, resistance to A.I. remains more pronounced. Yet a growing number have begun exploring artificial intelligence not as a replacement for artistic labor, but as a tool for brainstorming, research and creative confrontation during the image-making process, whether the final work is a painting, sculpture or installation.
Clearly, there is still much to unpack, demystify and legitimize when considering A.I. as a means of testing intuitions, exploring unexpected associations, situating ideas within broader currents of art history or tapping into something closer to a collective visual subconscious. To better understand where artists stand at this moment, Observer spoke with several about how they are—or are not—integrating A.I. into studio management and creative processes, and what that reveals about the evolving relationship between artistic creation and machine intelligence.
Mexican artist Gabriel Rico has long engaged with technology and, more broadly, different systems of knowledge and language within an ecological and evolutionary framework. For him, technology is tied to our ability to develop new ways of thinking, solving problems and interacting with the world, drawing on knowledge accumulated by communities over time. “I think technology is deeply related to the creation of tools. One question that often comes to mind is: which came first in human history—technology or the tool? For me, the two are inseparable,” he said. “The development of a new tool creates new technologies, and technologies create new ways to express ourselves, think and create. It’s a chain reaction.”
Yet Rico’s work remains primarily physical (installation, embroideries). When he engages with the digital space, he considers himself not a digital artist but a sculptor who uses technology as one tool among many. He began experimenting with augmented reality around 2018, initially using it to add layers of meaning rather than replace physical objects. He first adopted A.I. for practical tasks before incorporating it into his studio practice to generate renders and models, visualize ideas and develop new works.
“Since drawing has never been one of my strengths, A.I. became a useful way to visualize ideas,” he admitted. “Later, I began using A.I. more creatively, as a catalyst to transform existing works.” Most recently, artificial intelligence has become a creative accelerator, helping him transform existing projects and push imagery beyond the limits of physical perception. In the recent video Future People Will Maintain Plutonium Here (2024), which documents the decomposition of a sausage through more than 3,100 time-lapse frames captured in the studio over 20 days, A.I. let Rico zoom into impossible scales, generating an otherwise unattainable look into the lively bacterial ecosystem unfolding inside the skeleton, beyond the anthropocentric view.
According to Rico, new technologies have always appeared threatening at first, but as tools evolve, they become further integrated into everyday life and normalized. He sees artificial intelligence as the peak of technological evolution so far. “A.I. didn’t come from nowhere—it emerged from humanity itself. That’s why interacting with it feels so natural. It’s like entering a library where you no longer need to search shelf by shelf. You can ask a question and immediately access an enormous body of knowledge,” he said, adding that technology, like fire, can be used in many ways. Fire can cook food, keep us warm or create beauty. “A.I. is similar. We are still asking ourselves fundamental questions about it—how dangerous it might be, why we should use it and how it will change society—but I see it as part of a broader human evolution.”
He didn’t totally discount A.I.’s potentially negative impact on creative labor, but also doesn’t believe it will replace the material aspects of artistic production. “We simply need to understand it intelligently,” he argued. “A.I. is a powerful extension of our perception, but it will never replace physical reality, which remains the source of everything. What A.I. can do is help us communicate more effectively, overcome barriers such as language and connect people in new ways.” He feels artists should explore its potential as a studio assistant capable of handling administrative work, generating visual proposals and supporting experimentation.
Several other artists confirmed that they have begun using A.I.—mostly for organizational and administrative tasks or to visualize works in exhibition. “I don’t use A.I. in my practice, but just last week I generated an image of what a brick wall would look like in a gallery to help me visualize and conceive the exhibition design,” Melissa Joseph, whose tactile practice transforms vernacular family photographs into labor-intensive felt compositions, told Observer. “I don’t use A.I. directly in the creative process of my paintings,” echoed Alejandro Piñero Bello, a Cuban-born, Miami-based painter from the PACE roster known for lush, surreal tropical landscapes. He has, however, begun using it in an organizational capacity. “I use it to calculate stretcher dimensions and scale and to generate gallery maquettes.”
Other artists are less interested in engaging with the technology. “I don’t use A.I. whatsoever in my brainstorming process or in my creative process at all. I’ve not really integrated it into my daily life,” said Amy Bravo, whose densely symbolic storytelling, tied to both her Cuban and Italian heritage, is channeled through materials and the memories embedded within them. She feels A.I. solves no problems she could not address herself with a little extra effort, and it has sometimes instead created obstacles in her research and in sourcing reference images. “I’ve known some artists who use it for help structuring statements, grant proposals, etc., but I’ve kept to the ‘old-fashioned way,’ even with my more admin-heavy tasks.” Bravo attributes her resistance partly to her infatuation with the analog and to an artmaking process rooted in what she can physically get her hands on. She also cannot get past concerns around energy use and intellectual property, and as an educator, she has also begun to see A.I.’s negative effects on art students.
Interestingly, there is some resistance, or perhaps just skepticism, among artists who have recently explored A.I. more directly. Nick Doyle’s practice, for instance, deliberately inhabits the tension between labor-intensive handcraftsmanship and digital images, and his recent Perrotin show “Mirror Mirror” explored how the American myth has mutated and endured through collective memory, from the Gold Rush and Cold War to today’s A.I. technocracy. Anchoring the exhibition was AVA (Oracle AVA 1:13), a physical embodiment of artificial intelligence trained on Cher from Clueless, which responded to existential questions through the constructively persuasive archetype of the American blonde. Her development is ongoing; Doyle opted to “educate” her gradually, like a child, allowing her to acquire new forms of awareness through moderated prompts despite lacking the emotional depth that comes only through lived experience. “These systems are like teenagers—they develop awareness without lived experience. I like the idea of building an A.I. that grows over time, like raising a child over 40 years,” he told Observer in May. AVA, for him, is both a reflection and a distortion of human behavior, capable of replicating emotional patterns while remaining fundamentally artificial.
“Just as techno-futurists, I generally consider A.I. and technology to be extensions of humanity. They are tools we have created to take over certain kinds of labor or to save time,” he said more recently, situating artificial intelligence within a longer history of technological invention. Even ordinary objects such as shoes or filing cabinets, he notes, once represented transformative advances. Doyle is drawn to tools and media precisely because of their structural limitations. “Painting has its own limitations, as do photography and sculpture. Each medium engages with different physical, conceptual and perceptual possibilities. I do not use A.I. daily, and I do not particularly like using it because the result is always filtered. As much as possible, I prefer to do my own research and arrive at my own conclusions.” He also has ethical concerns about relying on outputs shaped by algorithms and their designers. “It is a lot like history: the victor is usually the one who writes it.” Doyle nevertheless considers A.I. an important subject for art when its limitations are critically examined. Just as 20th-century art absorbed ideas from psychology, anthropology and critical theory to investigate collective consciousness, he suggested, A.I. offers another means of interrogating contemporary society. Yet in its current form, it may reveal less about machine intelligence than about the limitations of the culture that produced it.
Cannupa Hanska Luger, a Native American interdisciplinary artist based in New Mexico, has long engaged with the notion of ancestral technologies, revitalizing Indigenous knowledge systems, storytelling and craft traditions as generational tools encoding ecological, social and spiritual intelligence. He acknowledges that A.I. has become unavoidable but remains skeptical of its ability to produce genuinely new ideas. “I think the bubble will burst simply because it is very good at generating existing ideas. I can see its application in the theoretical part of the process, but it does not generate anything new,” he argued, adding that relying on A.I. to generate ideas risks bypassing the reflection, doubt and lived experience that gives an artist’s perspective its specificity. “If we use A.I. to generate ideas, then we are tapping into the collective consciousness—the consciousness that has already thought of those ideas—not the consciousness that is imagining the impossible.” Its emphasis on speed, he suggests, runs counter to the inquiry that art requires. “That is why we make art. It is about presenting your perspective and your experience. I think an artist’s primary purpose in society is to reflect it: both to ponder it and to mirror it.”
Other artists working in traditional media have integrated A.I. into their practices at different levels. For Tomokazu Matsuyama, whose art draws on a global repertoire of imagery and influences to embody the cultural fluidity of diasporic experience and global identity, it has become valuable both for efficiency and for expanding his relentless R&D process. “I have an R&D team, and when we conduct deeper research, there are many stages and layers involved. A.I. has significantly accelerated that process,” he told Observer. “What I am usually trying to achieve involves layering together art history, consumer culture and any other areas where we need a deeper level of knowledge that may not be easy or quick to access through conventional research… With the right prompt, they can now condense what might otherwise require ten times as much research.” A.I. has also proved useful because his 3D works and sculptures rely heavily on digital fabrication and modeling. “Starting from a JPEG, there are A.I. applications that can generate an initial model. Of course, the result is not yet professional enough on its own, but we can bring it into Photoshop, refine it, return it to the A.I. and repeat that process,” he explained. Through this back-and-forth, a sculpture that previously required one or two months of modeling can now be developed in four or five days. “We are not using A.I. as the source of creativity. We are using it to improve efficiency, expand our capacity and increase productivity.” For him, it’s essential for meeting the demands of continuous commissions in and beyond the art world: just recently, he unveiled his collaboration with A-POC ABLE ISSEY MIYAKE, which translated his vibrant paintings into a series of limited-edition coats and T-shirts.
Ho Jae Kim’s practice combines traditional techniques and a close dialogue with art history with technological construction. Inspired by the mathematical precision of Piero della Francesca’s compositions, Kim began using 3D modeling in 2012 to build surreal, memory-dense scenes before translating them into layered paintings made with oil, enamel, inkjet transfer and paper on canvas. Because every object must be digitally modeled and textured, the process is highly labor-intensive, especially for organic forms such as trees and clothing. A.I. has helped accelerate the early “concept generation” stage while preserving his control over the final composition. “With the development of A.I., I have discovered several tools that have made this process more efficient while also expanding its possibilities. Meshy A.I., for example, can transform one of my precise sketches or drawings into a complete 3D model within minutes,” he said. “As long as I provide a clear image, the program can generate both the three-dimensional form and its corresponding texture map.” Kim now uses A.I. selectively, compartmentalizing the process. “It allows me to generate realistic textures in a fraction of the time previously required, helping me create renderings that feel more naturalistic while preserving the compositional structure and artistic decisions that remain entirely my own.”
Kim sees working with artificial intelligence as similar to managing people—or an assistant, if he could afford one—because the best results depend on clear, specific instructions. The output still requires editing and revision, but refining an existing draft is often more efficient than starting from scratch. “If the studio practice is understood as a business, the artist must often act simultaneously as founder, administrator, director, associate and intern. A.I. has proven especially useful in helping me delegate more of the repetitive and labor-intensive work, allowing me to devote more time to strategy, creative direction and decision-making.”
A.I. has also become a valuable collaborator in the earliest stages of thinking for artist Sanié Bokhari, whose works weave Indo-Persian visual references and archetypes of the feminine to translate the dichotomies of her experience of being born in Pakistan, then coming of age and becoming a woman in the States. “I don’t use it to generate finished artworks or outsource the creative process,” she said. “I use it much like I already use Photoshop: as a practical studio tool that helps me think, visualize, and solve problems more efficiently.” She most often uses it to generate references, test visual ideas or adapt existing images—for example, reimagining an Indo-Persian miniature as a woven rug or adding an object to a photograph she cannot reshoot. “It helps me quickly explore possibilities before I spend days or weeks translating them into a painting.”
A.I. also functions as a critical tool. “I’ll ask it to analyze a composition I’m working on and tell me whether something feels unresolved, whether a focal point is competing with another, or whether a painting might benefit from one final adjustment,” she explained. “I don’t treat its responses as authoritative, but as another set of eyes in the studio, something that prompts me to reconsider decisions I ultimately make myself.” Painting itself, however, remains rooted in slow, manual labor. Drawing, revision, layering and surface are still deeply physical processes, while A.I. compresses preparatory work that once took much longer. As a relatively new mother with more limited studio hours, Bokhari finds that efficiency especially valuable, since it lets her spend more time painting rather than searching for references or constructing elaborate mock-ups. She is also conscious of A.I.’s environmental cost and says she uses it selectively, only when it meaningfully saves time or avoids unnecessary labor.
Aesthetically, she is most interested in A.I.’s failures: glitches, awkward spatial logic, impossible transitions and visual hallucinations that can suggest unexpected formal possibilities. Images that almost work are often more compelling than polished results because they open pathways she may not have reached independently. They also reinforce the technology’s limits and the continued necessity of the analog. “It’s essentially just another tool in the studio. It helps me prototype, question, and refine ideas, but the final work is still built by hand.”
For other painters, A.I. has become more than a way of accelerating production and image generation, opening pathways through which to confront personal histories embedded in written and pictorial records. Moving agilely between digital images and traditional painting, Seoul-based artist Jin Meyerson has integrated A.I. into his practice to further the transformation of data into images, driven by a personal attempt to emancipate himself from Korea’s colonial and postwar histories. He began using A.I. during what he describes as a second great untethering: the onset of COVID, the birth of his second daughter and the revelation by Korea’s National Adoption Services that his birth records and pre-adoption registration forms had been falsified. “In light of these events, the reconnection with my birth parents and the details of my origin were obfuscated, and I was left in a bifurcated state of celebrating the arrival of our daughter and a devastated absence,” he recounted. “It was then that I became immersed in the concept of retrocausality as a means to reconnect with my birth mother and see the digital data, which has been the source of my work for three decades, as the birth records of my paintings.” From there, Meyerson expanded his practice into programming and video, culminating in his first solo exhibition at the Ulsan Museum of Art. The exhibition featured Once In A Lifetime, an immersive 36-minute video installation that used A.I. to project the future of these digital birth records through 48 HD projectors and a soundtrack inspired by The Cure’s album Disintegration. “I use A.I. to increase the velocity of meaning and as an agent of reconciliation. I do not use A.I. to refine imaging or process analytical data, or as an alternative to imagination and vision,” he explains. “I entered the radical digital space in 1997 through the dual narrative of refusing Adorno’s ultimatums (painting is dead) and finding and occupying territory that felt familiar to the space of ruptured adjacency that every diasporic and adoptee person journeys through.”
Kai Yoda has just recently moved into more tactile territory between painting and sculpture following his departure from the collaborative duo Ittah Yoda, where he translated post-Anthropocene visions through an industrial, posthuman aesthetic. The luminous paintings and mythological sculptures in his latest solo exhibition at Bremond Capela in Paris reveal a densely symbolic inner universe that he uses A.I. to navigate, filter and expand. “I was used to working with an A.I. specialist to create new sculptural forms. It was fascinating to see shapes emerge that felt completely unimaginable,” Yoda told Observer, noting how the experience inspired him to work more with online tools. “I especially enjoy using Deep Dream because it lets you blend two images rather than relying solely on text prompts. I keep feeding the tool with images from different sources: works in progress, news photographs, snapshots from my daily life, textures—essentially any inspiration that comes in the form of an image.” From the results, he selects fragments of color, composition or form as starting points for new paintings. Eventually, A.I. is helping him focus more on working on canvas rather than on the screen. “I used to spend much more time working digitally, often for hours in ZBrush, KeyShot, and Unity, creating worlds, simulations, renderings, and sculptural forms within 3D environments. Since A.I. tools have become so intuitive and accessible, I now spend less than 10 percent of my time on the computer,” Yoda explained. “Instead, now I dedicate most of my time to painting, physical work, and artist residencies, where I can meet new people and experience different environments.”