By Annette Lee, Contributing Columnist • May 15, 2026

Generative artificial intelligence is a controversial topic, especially in creative spaces. Some argue that its use can expand human creativity and enhance human art, while others fear it will eventually be used to replace human art altogether.

Art should be a product of the human soul and the human soul alone. Its purpose should be to move the viewer emotionally and leave a lasting impression for audiences to reflect on. Ultimately, AI strips away the most important aspect of art — the human behind it. 

It is becoming increasingly more evident that society is moving in a direction that will only harm the arts further — Coral Hart is just one example of this.

Hart provides an example of how AI is being used in the publishing industry. Hart, who uses a pen name because of the stigma around AI use, is a romance author who self-published over 200 books last year using Claude AI. She advocates for writers to use AI and founded PlotProse, in which she teaches people who sign up for her program how to use AI to write their books. Through PlotProse, she teaches others how to bypass the content filter on AI machines and generate more explicit content.

On her website, she boasts how she makes six figures from AI generating her books. Hart told The New York Times, “If I can generate a book in a day, and you need six months to write a book, who’s going to win the race?”

However, the shift from viewing writing books as a passion from the author’s mind and soul to a quick money-making scheme threatens the very nature of art itself. It commodifies art and encourages the rapid consumption of the “quick and easy.”

Additionally, the methods used to train AI are extremely unethical.

In 2025, authors sued Anthropic, the company behind Claude, for pirating their books to train its AI. The books were found on Library Genesis and other piracy websites. According to the court ruling, Anthropic illegally downloaded at least 7 million books and used them to train Claude. 

The document stated that Anthropic preferred pirating books over purchasing them because dealing with the potential legal tediousness was a hassle. The court ruled that using published books to train AI was legal, but using piracy to do so was not.

AI steals from authors and is already being used to replace human work. It provides a shortcut for people to bypass the actual heart behind writing, and its incorporation in the publishing industry will kill the passion in authors who genuinely want to publish work they are proud of.

Hart is not the only person who believes that AI will positively transform creative industries.

Another example of how a significant figure in a creative industry, the film industry, predicts AI will positively transform art is Joe Russo, a prominent movie director most known for co-directing “Avengers: Infinity War” and “Avengers: Endgame” with his brother Anthony Russo. 

Joe Russo shared with Collider how he believed AI would be a revolutionary development for the film industry. He explained how he hoped that in the future, viewers could use AI to generate stories personalized to them. 

In his ideal future, he imagined how any person could come home after a long day and, for example, ask AI to generate a hyperrealistic rom-com starring the viewer and Marilyn Monroe. It could then generate a movie with the viewer as the main character, in which the self-insert would illustrate life-like similarity to its own viewer, and the voice of the self-insert would be a replica of the viewer’s own voice. He praised how people in the future could generate stories for themselves, curating movies directly to them.

Joe Russo’s film utopia sounds like a dystopia in disguise. The purpose of producing art is so the viewer can learn something from it. Specifically, generating content for yourself will not teach you anything significant and will not move you as a real, human-made film will.

The art of filmmaking is the time and effort spent by countless crew, production members, scriptwriters and artists collaborating and beautifully executing a finished human product. Art should not be diminished as mere entertainment; it is so much more. It has the power to move, shape and challenge the way one sees the world.

However, some people believe that refusing to use AI will only harm them in the future. Some proponents of AI use in creative fields argue that those who refuse to embrace AI will inevitably get left behind in the age of technological advancement. 

Because it is becoming increasingly implemented in society, some people have embraced the change. Its use in the workplace may soon become an expectation for many jobs, and people fear that maintaining a staunch anti-AI stance may negatively affect job opportunities. People may use AI because they are afraid of getting discarded in favor of a candidate who is willing to use it without an issue.

However, people who enter creative fields possess an innate passion for their art. Turning to AI means art simply becomes a means to an end, and it sucks the joy out of what was previously a rewarding project, of which one could feel a sense of pride about completing.

Encouraging generative AI due to its efficiency and speed erases the most important aspect of art from the picture — the human. AI turns what was once strictly human into a shallow mimicry of the human experience. 

Annette is a junior in LAS.

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