Is It Art or Imitation? The Uneasy Emotions Around AI Imagery

From Discomfort to Creation: The Questions We Must Ask

Author

Inky
April 06, 2025

Anyone who has generated an image with AI has likely heard these kinds of reactions:

“Can you really call that art?”


“It just steals other artists’ work and mashes it together.”


“You press a button and it pops out—how is that creating anything?”

These aren’t just questions—they’re emotional objections.

They reflect not only discomfort, but also signal deeper concerns:
Where do we draw the line between art and imitation, between technology and creativity, between ethics and aesthetics?

Wait—what is a “Prompt Engineer”?

In this article, a “prompt engineer” refers to a language-based creator who precisely instructs AI on what to generate and how to generate it.

They go far beyond giving simple commands. They specify camera angles, lighting conditions, emotional tone, and even cultural context—crafting the language that shapes AI’s output, whether it’s images, text, code, or video.

The prompt isn’t a button—it’s a screenplay. The engineer isn’t a user—they’re a designer of emotional architecture.

A Note from the Author: I’m Not a Visual Artist

I’m not a designer or a trained artist. (You might have guessed that by looking at my website.)

I come from the humanities, and this series is an attempt to explore the world of AI image creation through the lens of linguistic and cultural analysis—not aesthetic mastery.

I’m not here to judge or draw boundaries.
This is a careful exploration of the tension between technology and emotion, between words and images.

Are Artists’ Rights Being Violated?

Most AI image generators have been trained on countless artworks—often without the artists’ consent or even awareness.

Not only their images, but their names and styles have been tagged into the data.

Many artists were shocked to discover prompts like “in the style of [artist name]” floating around the internet—feeling a deep violation:

“Is this what I’ve become? A consumable tag in someone else’s dataset?”

This isn’t just a copyright debate.
It’s a direct threat to creators’ identities, livelihoods, and agency.

Mass-Produced Images and the Feeling of Shallowness

There’s no denying how stunning AI-generated images can be.
But ironically, their easy accessibility leads many to question their value.

  • A single click

  • A few lines of text

  • And out comes a polished “artwork”

Too often, the result is a kind of beauty stripped of narrative or emotion.
What’s left is surface-level appeal, lacking soul.

Many people describe this experience as:

“Beautiful, but empty.”

So Why Start This Series?

I’m less interested in whether “AI is killing art.”
Instead, I want to ask:

Can AI image generation evolve into an artistic medium?

And can the human who prompts the AI be considered a creator?

I believe all of us carry our own criteria for what qualifies as high-quality art.
Mine is this:

What kind of language led to this image?


How does this prompt differ from the ones that came before?

Like reading a book: the topic may be familiar, the structure familiar—but suddenly, something hits differently.
And if that difference moves me, affects how I think or live—
Then yes, to me, that’s meaningful. That’s art. That’s truth.

What I pay attention to is the prompt.

Here, the prompt is not a command.
It’s an attempt to design emotion, construct narrative, and translate philosophy into image.

And the person writing those prompts?
They are the prompt engineers of this generation.

Coming Next

In this Prompt Art Inquiry Series, we’ll dive into how AI image generation is expanding the meaning of creativity.

The next article explores:

  • The early structure of prompts

  • And how they’ve evolved into emotional design languages

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