An artist on AI art: boring, stolen and bad for the planet

When artist Jess Harwood looks at images made by AI, she feels anger. To her, it is not art. It is a boring theft that is killing the planet and robbing people of the meaning of real creativity.

Theft without a conscience

Harwood describes AI art as boring, soulless and stolen. Generative models are trained on the work of real artists, often without their consent and without any compensation. Photographs, paintings and sculptures from people all over the world end up in an AI training dataset so that the machine can "learn" to create something "new".

But when an AI generator produces an image, it does not create. It reprocesses. The algorithm combines elements from thousands of other people's works, performs a statistical synthesis and spits out the result. This is not inspiration, not intuition, not the courage of an artist who decides to take a risk. It is sterile calculation passed off as "creativity".

"When I see AI art, I see red.

It's boring, it's theft, it's soulless, sterile and it kills the planet."

The planet pays in energy

But Harwood's criticism is not limited to questions of morality and copyright. There is something more urgent: the environment. AI models require enormous computing resources. Training generative models demands megawatts of electricity and gallons of water to cool data centers. The data centers that power AI services consume energy on a scale that once seemed unimaginable. Every request to an AI generator comes with an electricity bill. That bill is often invisible to the user, but the planet pays it.

• Cooling servers requires millions of gallons of water a day
• Data center energy consumption rivals that of entire countries
• Water is used in regions where people face shortages

Creativity alone at a concert

A young Jess Harwood once sat at a Split Enz concert, one of the few young people in the hall. She listened to songs about genuine human experience: joy, pain, feelings that only a human can express. And she felt relief: this music was made by people who had lived, felt and created without AI.

Today, looking at generated images, Harwood often catches herself wondering whether the author used AI. That question is a symptom of growing distrust of creative work in the age of AI.

Painting by hand is not just a technique. It is meditation, a struggle with the material, a dialogue with the canvas. The artist makes decisions in real time, reacts to the paint, corrects mistakes and grows. AI does not offer that. Quickly generating a "pretty picture" does not make you more creative. It hollows you out.

What this means

The debate over AI art is not just a matter of aesthetic taste. It is a question of protecting artists' copyright, of what values we will pass on to the next generation, and of the future of our planet. Letting algorithms dominate creative culture means cheaply giving away a part of our humanity.