MY STATEMENT ON GENERATIVE AIΒ
β LIREΒ LA VERSION FRANΓAISEΒ
Art is the union of craftsmanship and creative thought. In art, the body, experience and mind cannot be separated.
DOLSON LEWIS
April 17, 2024 / updated on July 20, 2026
β LIREΒ LA VERSION FRANΓAISEΒ
Far from being resistant to progress, I am nevertheless utterly opposed to imposture.
Like me, a considerable number of artists are capable of developing their ideas through their genuine abilities. They know how to write, draw, paint, compose, play an instrument and create with their own hands, from their own ideas. Unfortunately, today, we are literally being overwhelmed by individuals who claim the title of artist merely because, with the greatest laziness and the utmost contempt for what art and creation truly are, they have asked an artificial intelligence to generate images, texts or pieces of music for them by giving it, with the most disheartening ease, a few keywords.
Even more tellingly, these self-proclaimed βartistsβ release their βworksβ without even making the effort to correct their flaws. Why? Because they are βartistsβ in name only, and are quite simply technically, intellectually and artistically incapable of making changes to these images, texts or pieces of music themselves.
A real-life example illustrates this trend particularly well. Someone recently told me, with a certain degree of pride, that he had begun creating orchestral compositions despite never having practised music before. In the space of two months, he had shared no fewer than fourteen βalbumsβ. He explained that he had created all of these pieces using artificial intelligence, while openly admitting that he possessed no particular skill in this field. Nevertheless, each of these pieces was put up for sale under his name, protected by copyright and accompanied by the statement: βProduced, composed and performed by [his name].β
The problem, therefore, no longer lies solely in the use of a tool, but in publicly attributing to oneself a skill that one nevertheless admits not to possess. Claiming to have composed, produced and performed a work generated entirely by artificial intelligence does not, in my view, amount merely to an imprecise choice of words: it is a dishonest representation of the creative process and a particularly insulting way of denying the work of those who have genuinely learned how to compose, produce and perform music.
With the emergence of this wave of impostors, art and artists are seeing their value diminished, and their work is sometimes even openly treated with contempt. How many times have I been asked, while sharing one of my illustrations or texts, whether that creation had been generated using AI? Is it no longer conceivable that human beings might be capable of creating, writing, drawing, painting and making music with their own hands and through their own minds? When will the day come when genuine artists, proud to share their work, are branded as liars and suspected of concealing their use of AI to create in their place?
People also frequently use the fact that I work digitally as an argument against me, implying that this makes me less legitimate than another artist. Yet unlike generative artificial intelligence, using a tablet still requires knowing how to draw, apply colour, construct perspective, respect proportions, organise a composition, and master light, volume and tonal values. A tablet is nothing more than a cold surface that creates absolutely nothing by itself. It makes no decisions, imagines no scenes, corrects no weaknesses and gives no meaning to the work. Drawing digitally is still drawing. A graphics tablet decides neither the composition, nor the gesture, nor the intention.
Should my writing also be criticised because I type my texts on a computer that gives me access to a spell-checker, whereas Victor Hugo or Alexandre Dumas wrote on paper? The medium changes, but the act remains. Word-processing software chooses neither the characters, nor the situations, nor the emotions, nor the words the author wishes to use.Β
When we oppose generative artificial intelligence, we are often met with a certain degree of contempt, sometimes accompanied by a devaluation of our own work, especially when we work digitally, as though this made any criticism of AI inconsistent or hypocritical. But this is to forget that, digital or not, with or without word-processing software, the work of an artist remains fundamentally different from the automatic generation of an image, a piece of music or a text by an interface that takes the place of the creative act itself.
Yes, I now work digitally most of the time. Yet my creative process remains entirely authentic.
For example, I am currently preparing a new painting. In order to construct this scene, my partner and I put on costumes so that I could take my own reference photographs. We had to choose the clothes, search for the right poses, move the light sources, retake several shots, alter the gestures and find the angle capable of conveying exactly what I had imagined. We had to position the light correctly, capture the right expression, check the coherence of the figures and bring the scene to life before I had even begun to execute the work.
All of this is part of the creative process. It involves hours spent together, hesitations, attempts, occasional awkward moments and experiences that will leave a trace in the history of the painting itself. When I tell the story of the creation of this work, I will be able to speak about it with emotion and feeling because it will be connected to a genuine human experience. It will have a story, a memory and a process.
With generative artificial intelligence, all of this disappears. A person formulates a request, writes a prompt and the machine carries out most of the work in their place. It composes the image, invents the forms, simulates the light, proposes the colours, constructs the details and produces the result. This is no longer truly an act of creation: it is simply placing an order with a machine.
Placing an artist who creates by themselves on the same level as someone who βcreatesβ with the help of artificial intelligence is like organising a hundred-metre race between an athlete who has trained for many years and a person who has never trained, but who is wearing an exoskeleton capable of increasing their strength and speed tenfold. The competition is rigged from the outset. And even if the second person wins the race, that victory will never make them an accomplished athlete or a sportsperson worthy of recognition.
To be an artist is to make the effort to spend hours, days, sometimes even months or years working on a piece. It is to endure the pain of sometimes having to erase everything and begin again. To be an artist is to derive pleasure from this creative suffering. To be an artist is to take pride in the pain, frustration and doubts that were necessary in order to create.
Giving an AI a few keywords so that it can create in your place, without any effort whatsoever on your part, will never make artists of you; it makes you impostors and thieves who deserve absolutely no visibility and no respect, but only the same contempt that you yourselves show towards genuine creators through your low-cost βworksβ, entirely devoid of talent, skill or interest.
Today, I am truly discouraged by the exponential spread of images, music, novels and texts generated by artificial intelligence. As an artist who creates essentially through the union of my own hands and my own mind, I am becoming increasingly bitter in the face of this growing number of impostures, and particularly irritated to see more and more people asking me whether my various creations were produced using artificial intelligence.
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For as long as I can remember, I have always drawn, written and created, seeking to transcend the monotony of everyday life through artistic creation, whether visual, musical or written. Today, all of my work in all of these fields is the result of more than thirty years of constant learning, work, research, evolution, improvements, experimentation, experience and practice. To see all of this effort, all of this energy and all of this passion reduced to the mere suspicion that my works might be the result of using cold and soulless software is becoming particularly unbearable to me.
This leads me to feel obliged to document the progress of my work in order to retain proof of its many stages of creation, in case someone should one day cast doubt on the honesty of my creative process. It is not healthy to have to face this kind of constraint or this kind of social pressure.
It also often leads me to wonder whether I still want to undertake the creation of a complex, time-consuming and energy-intensive work, while taking the risk of encountering the scepticism of those who seem, sadly, to have decided to believe that a human being is no longer capable of creating by themselves and must inevitably resort to artificial intelligence in order to express themselves intellectually and artistically.
π§ππ ππ‘π¦πͺππ₯ ππ¦ π‘π’!!!
For as long as I can remember, I have always drawn, written and created, seeking to transcend the monotony of everyday life through artistic creation, whether visual, musical or written. Today, all of my work in all of these fields is the result of more than thirty years of constant learning, work, research, evolution, improvements, experimentation, experience and practice. To see all of this effort, all of this energy and all of this passion reduced to the mere suspicion that my works might be the result of using cold and soulless software is becoming particularly unbearable to me.
This leads me to feel obliged to document the progress of my work in order to retain proof of its many stages of creation, in case someone should one day cast doubt on the honesty of my creative process. It is not healthy to have to face this kind of constraint or this kind of social pressure.
It also often leads me to wonder whether I still want to undertake the creation of a complex, time-consuming and energy-intensive work, while taking the risk of encountering the scepticism of those who seem, sadly, to have decided to believe that a human being is no longer capable of creating by themselves and must inevitably resort to artificial intelligence in order to express themselves intellectually and artistically.
Some activities gain nothing from being replaced, because their value lies precisely in the fact that they are performed by a human being.
Art is not a burden from which humanity needs to be βfreed.β Painting, drawing, writing, or composing are not forms of servitude comparable to difficult or repetitive labour. They are human practices rooted in experience, sensitivity, gesture, thought, and learning. Automating art does not liberate the artist; it removes the very act that gives the work its value.
Art should remain in the hands of artists, not to protect a privilege, but because art whose author has neither conceived nor carried out the essential part of the work is no longer a human creation: it is a generated product.
Rejecting this substitution is not an attempt to hinder progress. It is a reminder that not everything that can be automated necessarily deserves to be. A civilisation does not progress merely by saving time; it also progresses by knowing what it refuses to sacrifice.
For posterity, and to affirm the sincerity of my work, I needed to share these words and conclude with this simple idea, which ultimately summarises everything:Art is the union of craftsmanship and creative thought. In art, the body, experience and mind cannot be separated.
DOLSON LEWIS
April 17, 2024 / updated on July 20, 2026