Artist on AI Art: Boring, Stolen, and Environmentally Harmful

When artist Jess Harwood looks at images created by AI, she feels anger. For her, this is not art — it is boring theft that kills the planet and deprives people of the meaning of true creativity.

Theft Without 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, sculptures by people from all over the world end up in the AI training dataset so the machine can "learn" to create something "new". But when an AI generator creates an image, it does not create — it reprocesses. The algorithm combines elements from thousands of others' works, produces a statistical synthesis, and spits out the result. This is not inspiration, this is not intuition, this is not the courage of an artist who decides to take a risk. This is sterile calculation, passed off as "creativity".

"When I see AI art, I see red.

It is boring, it is theft, it is 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 — ecology. AI models require enormous computing resources. Training generative models is a process that requires megawatts of electricity and gallons of water to cool data centers. Data centers that power AI services consume energy on scales that once seemed unimaginable. Every request to an AI generator is a bill for electricity. And this bill is often invisible to the consumer, but the planet pays it.

• Cooling servers requires millions of gallons of water per day
• Energy consumption of data centers rivals the consumption of entire countries
• Water is used in regions where people experience shortages

Creativity Alone at a Concert

At a Split Enz concert sat a young Jess Harwood. One of the few young people in the hall. She listened to songs that spoke of genuine human experience — of joy, of pain, of feelings that only a human can express.

And she is struck by relief: this music was created by people who lived, felt, and created without AI. Today, looking at generated images, Harwood often catches herself asking: did this author use AI? This question is a symptom of growing distrust of creativity in the age of AI.

Drawing by hand is not just a technique. It is meditation, a struggle with material, a dialogue with canvas. An artist makes decisions in real time, responds to paints, corrects mistakes, grows.

AI does not provide this. Quick generation of a "beautiful picture" does not make you more creative — it hollows you out.

What This Means

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