By Chris Hoff

There’s a particular kind of vertigo that comes with watching a technology arrive faster than the culture can metabolize it. Photographers felt it in the 1840s. Painters felt it again when Photoshop showed up. Now it’s AI’s turn, and the stakes feel somehow higher, not just because the tool is more capable, but because it’s aimed directly at the thing artists have always held as irreducibly theirs: the act of making something from nothing.

To find out what working artists and gallerists in the OC actually think, I sent out a short survey. The responses were candid, contradictory in the best ways, and occasionally funny. Nobody hedged much. What follows is their thinking, more or less unfiltered.

The speed argument, and why it doesn’t settle anything

The first question I asked was this: if AI can generate images in seconds, what remains uniquely human about making art? Tm Gratkowski, a local artist, pushed back on the premise. “Just because something is computationally faster doesn’t make it inherently better,” he wrote, invoking Kasparov and Deep Blue — a comparison that still has legs. “The artistic choices we make are shaped by our experiences, emotions, memories, and perspectives. Art resonates because it reflects lived experience. AI can generate impressive images, music, and text, but it does not feel, remember, or experience the world.”

Carolyn Saylor, who works as both a graphic designer and fine artist, put it differently, and maybe more personally: “Art made from a beating heart and a life lived will always have an essence that rises above even the most impressive AI rendering. Can AI recognize artistic rules and choose to break them for effect? Can it misremember the size of its childhood home and make art about how it felt to be a kid? Can it grieve, or fall in love?”

The painter Jeff Gillette went further, framing it as a question of authorship rather than process. AI image generators, he wrote, produce things that are “not art” in any meaningful sense, they have “no authorship.” But his response was less dismissive than that framing suggests. Gillette drew a historical comparison to the Impressionists, who didn’t collapse in the face of photography but instead radicalized their practice in response to it, pushing color, surface, and individual mark-making in directions the camera couldn’t follow. “One should not hide from or try to disqualify the technological inevitability of AI visuals,” he wrote. “Artists need to accept the inevitability of AI ‘art’ as a permanent fixture to contemporary visual creativity… Know thy enemy, and thus use, abuse, and eventually surpass its limitations.”

Alisa Ochoa took a harder line on what gets lost when shortcuts are taken. “The image-making process and the meaning we assign to it disappear. Failure, iteration, the creative work itself: that’s what makes discovery human and rewarding. It’s stolen when shortcuts are taken.” She added, with a wryness that felt earned: “Where’s the misery, the fun, the chance to persist through life’s endless assignments?”

Tool, threat, or something stranger

When I asked whether AI is a creative tool, a threat to artists, or something else, almost everyone answered: all three, depending on the day. Lance Carlson was relatively sanguine. If an artist takes AI-generated imagery as a starting point and then runs it through their own practice, experience, and physical process, he sees it as a legitimate reference tool, “not unlike using a photograph as reference.” Saylor agreed in principle but was more guarded about what the adoption of AI signals culturally: “It was birthed in such an ethically complicated way, trained on the work of countless unpaid artists, yet also has the opportunity to democratize learning and may even open doors to entirely new forms of creative expression, however unsavory that might sound to artists today.”

Gratkowski compared the moment to the discovery of fire. “Finding the flame was only the beginning; people then had to learn how to control it, harness it, and ultimately use it to transform the world around them.” He’s seen artists begin using AI to explore ideas, test compositions, and generate reference before starting actual work, a workflow that feels continuous with how artists have always used available technology.

Ochoa wasn’t buying the techno-optimism. She’s particularly irritated by what she sees as the forced adoption of AI tools in contexts where the human alternative is better, including her son’s school, where a Canva app that generates polished visuals has arrived on school-issued computers. “He’s perfectly capable of making a great poster with paint and found cardboard.” Her larger concern wasn’t really about AI per se but about a creeping ideology of optimization that AI accelerates: “Without human curiosity driving the process, everything flattens out and becomes homogeneous.”

Photographer and artist Amir Zaki offered the most stripped-down take. “I see it as a technology with flaws and the potential for creative use,” he wrote, then added, with characteristic directness: “I don’t hope or fear anything about the art world. That has proven unhelpful for me in the past.” The audience, he noted, is still human, which means art is still made and received within a social context no algorithm controls.

What the art world might get wrong

The third question, what do you hope the art world gets right, and what do you fear it will get wrong, produced the most anxious answers.

Saylor’s concern was about pace and the economics of attention. “I hope the art world remembers and embraces that art making is not a productivity contest. As AI makes it possible for one person to produce exponentially more than ever before, I worry we will lose the value of slowness, the magic of independent thinking, the ability to daydream, and the process of true discovery: experimentation and failure.” She suspects fine art may actually come through this relatively intact, “process becomes a signal that the art was made by a human” but her greater worry is for artists working in commercial and corporate contexts, where speed and cost already outcompete human-driven design.

Jackie Danger, who recently opened House of Danger Gallery in Costa Mesa at a moment when larger galleries are closing, sees the conversation through a market lens. “I believe in Original Art,” she wrote. “I don’t think that AI will ever have that organic presence. While it can be used as a wonderful tool for brainstorming, it’s no replacement for something flawed and human made.” She thinks the value of handmade, human-authored work will only increase as AI proliferates, a bet she seems to be making with her own gallery.

Gratkowski echoed the historical reassurance: “Every major shift in artistic practice has been met with skepticism, and every work of art invites countless interpretations. That’s simply the nature of art and its criticism. AI is just a new paradigm in that discussion.” Saylor added a note of necessary honesty: “I also try to keep in mind that major technological shifts create winners and losers, and there are powerful cultural and financial incentives for both sides. It’s easy to see who benefits if we do use AI, but who benefits if we don’t?”

Ochoa closed with what might be the bluntest line in the whole survey: “If I’m being honest, I don’t have much hope for the art world, but I always do for artists. It has been wrong before and will be again. I hope that this one doesn’t cost us our humanity. Let’s be less bot.”

What comes through in all of this, even the most skeptical responses, is that nobody thinks AI is going away, and almost nobody thinks the human impulse to make art is going away either. The real question is about what gets lost in the middle: the slow time, the wrong turns, the misremembered childhoods, the misery and the fun. Those aren’t frictions or inefficiencies. They’re the thing itself. The artists represented here seem to understand that. Whether the art world does is another question.