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In 1859, the poet Charles Baudelaire wrote one of the most famous takedowns in the history of art criticism. His target was photography. He called it "el mayor enemigo mortal del arte" and dismissed it as the refugio de todo pintor fracasado demasiado sin talento como para coger un pincel de verdad. La fotografía, según él, era una máquina que fingía hacer el trabajo de un artista. No requería imaginación, ni habilidad, ni visión creativa. Era puramente mecánica y, por tanto, puramente sin alma. Y sin embargo, la de Dorothea Lange Migrant Mother helped mobilize federal food aid during the Great Depression, the Apollo 8 crew's Earthrise La fotografía cambió la forma en que toda una generación entendió nuestro planeta, y llegó a convertirse en una de las formas creativas más importantes que los humanos hemos desarrollado.
A little over a century later, synthesizers got the same treatment. When synth-pop began filling the charts in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the backlash was immediate and visceral. Gary Numan described the "hostility" he faced from critics who didn't think electronic music qualified as real music, because they believed the machines were doing the work. OMD frontman Andy McCluskey dicho claramente: there were a great many people who genuinely thought the equipment wrote the song for you. Queen printed "No Synthesizers!" on four consecutive album sleeves in the 1970s, as if to reassure listeners that what they were hearing was still legitimate. And by 1982, the UK Musicians' Union had voted to ban synthesizers and drum machines outright, convinced that electronic instruments would make human players obsolete. And yet today, electronic music is one of the most listened-to genres on earth, and synthesizers are so deeply embedded in modern production that most pop songs wouldn't exist without them.
These critiques probably sound eerily familiar. If you swapped "photography" or "synthesizer" for "AI art," you could find nearly identical arguments posted in comment sections and published in think pieces today, because while the tools change, the anxiety clearly doesn't.
We are, as a species, compulsively creative. We build tools, we extend our capabilities, and then we spend a generation or two being deeply unsettled by what we've built before finally absorbing it into the fabric of normal life. Cities once felt like an affront to the natural world. The printing press was going to destroy the memory of scholars. Recorded music was supposed to end live performance. The internet was going to rot our brains (jury's still out on this one). But in each of these cases, the tool eventually became so thoroughly woven into human culture that we stopped seeing it as foreign and started seeing it as ours.
La conversación en torno al «arte con IA» está ahora mismo muy metida en la fase del miedo, y la propia etiqueta es parte de lo que la mantiene ahí.
When you call something "AI art," you decenter the human artist
A photographer isn't a "camera artist." A filmmaker isn't a "lens storyteller." A graphic designer isn't a "software illustrator." We don't name creative practitioners by their tools, because the tool isn't what makes the work meaningful or distinctive as an end result. The creative vision behind it is what does that.
When you call something "AI art," you put the tool in the spotlight and push the human right off the stage. Every conversation that follows naturally orbits around the software: Is the AI creative? Does it deserve credit? Is it really art if a human didn't make every mark? These are interesting philosophical questions, but they're almost entirely beside the point for the millions of people using generative tools to do real creative work every single day.
The label also flattens an enormous range of creative practices into one reductive term. Consider what "AI art" is currently being asked to cover: a brand creative director prototyping visual directions for a campaign, a solo illustrator building a consistent fantasy world they couldn't afford to render any other way, a filmmaker generating storyboard imagery at speed, a fashion designer exploring colorways in real time, a small business founder who finally has a way to make content that feels like their brand instead of like stock footage. These are wildly different practices with different goals, different skill sets, and different outputs. The only thing they share is one piece of the pipeline, and that shared tool has somehow become the defining characteristic of all of them, which would be a bit like calling every piece of writing created in Google Docs "software literature."
Even the art world can't agree on what the term means. A encuesta reciente de Artsy of more than 300 gallery professionals found three competing definitions in active use: some define "AI art" as fully prompt-based work, others focus on artistic intent regardless of tool, and others classify anything where AI meaningfully shapes the outcome. The survey's own conclusion was telling: these debates about legitimacy and value are happening without a common vocabulary. Professionals in the same field are using the same term to describe fundamentally different things, and then arguing about whether those different things have merit.
The legal world is starting to weigh in
The court of cultural opinion tends to dominate these conversations, but it's worth paying attention to what's happening in actual courts. Because when the legal system starts hearing cases and making room for how a new technology is actually being used, that's historically one of the clearest signs that it's here to stay and that culture will eventually follow. It always starts with a few brave people who just want to create, and little by little their work becomes recognized not just in law but in our colloquial way of life.
On March 2, 2026, the El Tribunal Supremo de EE. UU. se negó a admitir Thaler contra Perlmutter, the decade-long case about whether AI can be an "author" under copyright law. The ruling was clear: copyright requires human authorship. Works created autonomously by AI, with no human creative contribution, cannot be copyrighted. But the court left room for works where humans maintain genuine creative control through direction, prompting, and alteration. In other words, the legal system already distinguishes between "the AI made this" and "a human made this using AI." When we call something "AI art," we linguistically frame it as the first category, even when the reality is almost always the second.
Entonces, ¿cómo lo llamamos?
Probablemente lo más sencillo: llámalo por lo que produce. Ilustración. Concept art. Imágenes de marca. Motion graphics. Diseño visual. Storyboards. Fotografía de campaña. El medio es el resultado, no el proceso que lo creó, y nadie le pregunta a un fotógrafo si su imagen se hizo con una Canon o una Hasselblad antes de decidir cómo llamarla.
Or, who knows, maybe it will be an entirely new word that doesn't exist yet, one we'll all get to help shape. Birthing lexicon to swaddle our newborn creative tools is its own kind of hard work.
What we should probably stop doing is defaulting to a term that makes the AI the author and the human the bystander. Because in every studio, brand team, and creative workflow where these tools are actually being used, that's not what's happening. What's happening is that people are making decisions, directing, editing, curating, and rejecting. They're exercising taste and doing the work that has always made creative work creative, just with a new instrument in their hands.
Y si te preguntas si este cambio ya está ocurriendo en la práctica, así es.
Señales positivas
We know that it can feel like there's a lot of shade being thrown at creators who use these tools right now, and that it's hard to tell how far we really are from a cultural shift where this kind of work is simply accepted for what it is. But the positive signals are already there. Every generation's technological revolution has its naysayers, but there are also always the Gary Numans and Andy McCluskeys of the world, already jamming out on their synths and pioneering entirely new sounds before the rest of the culture catches up. The same thing is happening right now with GenAI.
Paul McCartney usó IA para extraer la voz de John Lennon de una cinta de demo de hace décadas y así completar «Now and Then," the final Beatles song. Nobody calls it an "AI song." They call it a Beatles song, because the AI was the instrument and the music was what mattered.
Grimes has built toda una infraestructura creativa en torno a la IA, desde su modelo de voz Elf.Tech que permite a los fans crear música usando su voz generada por IA hasta arte visual vendido en Christie's. No se define a sí misma como «artista de IA». Es una artista que usa la IA, entre muchas otras herramientas, para hacer realidad una visión que abarca música, arte visual y tecnología.
Y cuando El brutalista ganó varios Óscar en 2025, incluido el de Mejor Actor para Adrien Brody, lo hizo tras usar IA para perfeccionar los acentos húngaros que Brody y Felicity Jones habían pasado meses aprendiendo con un entrenador de dialectos. La tecnología pulió vocales y sonidos concretos en posproducción para preservar la autenticidad de unas interpretaciones que eran, en todo sentido significativo, de los propios actores. Nadie llama El brutalista una «película de IA». Es una película, y la IA fue solo una pequeña parte invisible de cómo se hizo.
How we think about this at OpenArt
When we talk about the people who use OpenArt, we don't call them "AI artists." We call them creators, storytellers, filmmakers, founders. When we describe what the platform does, we don't say "AI generates images for you." We say "bring your characters, stories, brands, and worlds to life." That's not a branding exercise. It's a reflection of something we genuinely believe, informed by the same history this piece has been tracing. (In fact, every image in this post was made with generative tools on OpenArt.)
El patrón nos indica que 1. the fear is real, 2. it's fundamentally human, and 3. esto también pasará. Nos dice que las herramientas siempre acaban integradas en la historia más amplia de cómo la gente crea cosas. Y nos dice que lo más útil que podemos hacer ahora mismo es crear herramientas que no estorben y dejen que los creadores se centren en lo que están creando, y en por qué.
There is something genuinely beautiful about the fact that we keep finding ourselves here, in yet another moment where humans have built something new and are arguing about whether it counts. Hundreds of years after Baudelaire tried to shut photography down and decades after the Musicians' Union tried to ban the synthesizer, we're still inventing new ways to create and share with each other, and no amount of early-stage resistance has ever managed to stop that from happening.