Jazzlyn Beltran
8 October 2026
AI art, or “AI-modified” images, seems to be all over now, in apps like Google, Pinterest, and social media. It’s becoming harder to distinguish what is real from what isn’t because it is developing to be more advanced every day. A common argument among people is that AI art is not real art.
Imagine entering a fine arts competition with an artwork you spent hours or days working on, just for someone else to come in with an AI-generated piece that probably took a couple of seconds or minutes to make and win. Because that's what someone named Jason M. Allen did: he entered an art competition in 2022 with AI-generated art. He won first place in the Colorado State Fair Fine Arts Competition, with a prize of three hundred dollars. The reason the judges let him win was that they were not familiar with the program Allen mentioned, so they were not aware that it was AI-generated until after he won the contest. The rulebook didn’t have any reason to disqualify him; artists were angry at this, probably because they must’ve put lots of time and effort into their submitted projects just for a computer to beat them.
So a question is, is creating AI-generated art a way to express yourself? A source states that Allen said, “I am standing in defense of my rights to express myself using AI generative tools and against a popular narrative that a lot of people, for some unknown agenda, are pushing really hard to prevent people from being able to express themselves,”.
A study called “Beyond the Machine: Why Human-Made Art Matters More in the Age of AI,” shows that people couldn’t distinguish human-made art from AI-generated art. So some may wonder why it matters that there is AI-generated art when people can’t distinguish the difference; why is it a problem? Well, the fact that people can’t tell the difference is exactly the problem. People could easily take credit for something created by AI, as Allen did; since it’s evolving more and more, it’s hard to tell if it is original work or not. People who participated in the study were biased against AI-generated works. One of the researchers named Sheena Iyengar said, “Although AI may replicate a style, it can never capture the deep narrative forged by human effort and intuition,”.
People consider human-created art more valuable, which makes AI a problem because if someone can get away with their art being completely theirs and not AI, while it was AI-generated, then they earn credit for something they put no effort into. Artists take years of practicing and learning art; what’s seen as valuable is what goes behind making art. A machine-designed artwork doesn’t have that effort and passion put in as humans do; it’s just a machine with no thoughts or feelings. People use art to express themselves; it’s the time in which they made it, the years of skills put into it. AI just takes in the style of what we make, how we speak, and makes something following that pattern.
