AI in Art & Design: Why the Medium Argument Changes Everything

Every generation of creatives has had this conversation. Traditional artists rejected digital artists. Same energy. Same fear. Same outcome. Digital is now the industry standard & nobody questions it.

AI in art & design is the same conversation on a new medium. I still consider AI artists, artists. A paintbrush is a medium. A stylus is a medium. A camera is a medium. AI is the newest one. The debate about whether it’s “real” art is the same debate we had 20 years ago about digital art. We know how that ended.

(If you’ve been following along, we covered AI as a tool & what separates the work that matters. This one goes deeper into what that looks like in art & design specifically.)

What Generative AI for Artists Actually Requires

Here’s what the conversation consistently skips is that AI prompting is a skill.

I have 20 years as an illustrator & designer. I still generate unusable trash regularly. Because to prompt well, you need to know the terminology, the art history, the influences, the techniques, the compositional rules, & the artists who shaped the style you’re working toward. All of that lives in your prompt. & even when you bring all of it, the output can still be entirely missed. Trust me! Like picking up a pencil & completely messing up the drawing.

The tool doesn’t exempt you from craft. It changes where the craft lives. The prompt is the brief. A bad brief has always produced bad work.

Generative AI Art in the Right Hands

@brain_racked is Ryan McCoy, a 20+ year VFX artist building an entire sci-fi universe using AI. He’s not generating & posting. He generates, then takes those outputs into Photoshop, tweaks them to his exact vision, & brings them to life. The AI produces the raw material. His two decades of visual expertise then direct it. The execution is genuinely cool, not because the tool is impressive. Well, it is, but in the right hands, it’s even better!

Then there’s another artist I came across, whose account I haven’t been able to track down again. He used Midjourney & Photoshop to create striking work. What stopped me mid-scroll: he posted what appeared to be him painting on an easel. Before I knew it was AI, I noticed the canvas, the subject matter, the figure, was interacting with him. He started posting more work like this, where the piece responded to the artist. If I find his account, I’ll share it. That kind of execution is the reason I can’t write AI art off entirely. I even messaged him & we talked for a while about his process.

Both are proof that the tool is only as interesting as the creative direction it receives.

AI in Design: From Concept to Pitch

Adey Efrem is a Senior Packaging Designer at Impossible Foods. She uses generative AI to build visual worlds around her packaging concepts. Her IKU skincare work is her latest example. She designed the packaging concept first, then used AI to build the expressive visual system around it. Choosing the right makeup look, deciding how polished or messy textures should feel, & figuring out which props added personality versus distraction. All of that still required serious iteration & design thinking. She’s done work across major CPG brands including Doritos, Coca-Cola, & Impossible Foods. The results speak for the process.

The Honest Workflow Truth

I’ve used AI in my own design work & the results are real, but so is the trash ratio.

For one project, I designed the initial concept by hand, well, in Illustrator, then used AI to create mockups of the product in retail spaces. We used those mockups to pitch the brand to an investor & closed five figures. The product is launching later this year. The AI didn’t design the pitch, but it did make the concept visible fast enough to matter. Yes, I could’ve done the mockups myself, but I enjoy experimentation.

From time to time, I use it for design assets: small leaves, hearts, custom shapes, quick elements I need to build out a layout. I generate it, tweak it, vector it, & integrate it. For composites & budget-conscious mockups, I’ll start in Photoshop, pull a generated asset, plug it into the design, & refine from there. Some of it is exactly what I needed. A lot of it is unusable.

AI can only do so much, at least in my hands. & that’s fine. That’s where the real work starts.

For a deeper look at how AI is shifting creative practice across the design industry, AIGA Eye on Design covers how working designers are integrating these tools into serious professional workflows.

Let It Steep

The medium argument is the one worth sitting with the longest. Here’s why.

Why “Is It Real Art?” Is The Wrong Question

Every time a new tool enters the creative space, the conversation defaults to legitimacy. Is it real? Does it count? Does it take skill? The question has never been useful & it isn’t now.

The more interesting question is: what does the tool demand of its user? A camera demands that you understand light, composition, timing, & subject. A stylus demands that you understand form, proportion, & mark-making. AI demands that you understand visual language, stylistic history, compositional logic, & how to communicate a creative vision in language precise enough for a model to interpret.

That’s nothing. That’s a different kind of skill. & like every other creative skill, it separates the people who use it well from the people who generate & post.

The appreciation shift is real. Knowing a piece is AI-generated changes how you receive it. But the same shift happened with digital art, photography, & every medium that came before. Over time, the medium fades into the background & the quality of the work takes over.

That’s already starting to happen with AI. The work that holds up isn’t holding up because of the tool. It’s holding up because of the creative direction it’s under.