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Perplexity
Claude
Gemini
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 "le pire ennemi de l'art" et l'a écarté comme refuge de tous les peintres ratés trop peu doué pour prendre un vrai pinceau. La photographie, à ses yeux, était une machine qui prétendait faire le travail d'un artiste. Elle ne demandait aucune imagination, aucun talent, aucune vision créative. Elle était purement mécanique, et donc purement sans âme. Et pourtant, celle de Dorothea Lange Migrant Mother helped mobilize federal food aid during the Great Depression, the Apollo 8 crew's Earthrise la photographie a transformé la façon dont toute une génération a compris notre planète, et elle est devenue l'une des formes créatives les plus importantes jamais développées par l'humanité.
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 "hostilité" qu'il a essuyée de la part de critiques pour qui la musique électronique n'était pas de la vraie musique, parce qu'ils pensaient que c'étaient les machines qui faisaient le travail. Andy McCluskey, leader d'OMD pour le dire simplement: beaucoup de gens pensaient sincèrement que l'équipement écrivait la chanson à ta place. Queen a imprimé « No Synthesizers ! » sur quatre pochettes d'album consécutives dans les années 1970, comme pour rassurer les auditeurs sur le fait que ce qu'ils entendaient restait légitime. Et dès 1982, le 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 conversation autour de l'« art par IA » est en plein dans la phase de la peur en ce moment, et l'étiquette elle-même contribue à l'y maintenir.
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."
Même le monde de l'art ne s'accorde pas sur le sens du terme. Un récent sondage 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 La Cour suprême des États-Unis a refusé d'examiner Thaler v. 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.
Alors, comment l'appeler ?
Le plus simple : nomme-le selon ce qu'il produit. Illustration. Concept art. Imagerie de marque. Motion design. Design visuel. Storyboards. Photographie de campagne. Le média, c'est le résultat, pas le pipeline qui l'a créé, et personne ne demande à un photographe si son image a été prise avec un Canon ou un Hasselblad avant de décider comment l'appeler.
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.
Et si tu te demandes si ce changement est déjà en train de se produire concrètement, la réponse est oui.
Signaux positifs
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 a utilisé l'IA pour extraire la voix de John Lennon d'une cassette de démo vieille de plusieurs décennies afin de compléter «Avant et après, la dernière chanson des Beatles. Personne ne l'appelle une « chanson IA ». On l'appelle une chanson des Beatles, parce que l'IA n'était que l'instrument et que c'est la musique qui comptait.
Grimes a créé toute une infrastructure créative autour de l'IA, de son modèle vocal Elf.Tech qui permet aux fans de créer de la musique avec sa voix générée par IA jusqu'à des œuvres visuelles vendues chez Christie's. Elle ne se qualifie pas d'« artiste IA ». C'est une artiste qui utilise l'IA, parmi bien d'autres outils, pour réaliser une vision qui embrasse la musique, l'art visuel et la technologie.
Et quand Le style brutaliste a remporté plusieurs Oscars en 2025, dont celui du meilleur acteur pour Adrien Brody, il l'a fait après avoir utilisé l'IA pour affiner les accents hongrois que Brody et Felicity Jones avaient passé des mois à apprendre avec un coach en dialecte. La technologie a peaufiné certaines voyelles et sonorités en post-production afin de préserver l'authenticité de performances qui étaient, à tous les égards, celles des acteurs eux-mêmes. Personne n'appelle Le style brutaliste un « film IA ». C'est un film, et l'IA n'a été qu'une petite partie invisible de sa fabrication.
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.)
Ce motif nous indique que 1. the fear is real, 2. c'est fondamentalement humain, et 3. ça aussi, ça passera. Ça nous dit que les outils finissent toujours par se fondre dans l'histoire plus vaste de la manière dont les gens créent. Et ça nous dit que la chose la plus utile que l'on puisse faire en ce moment, c'est de créer des outils qui s'effacent et laissent les créateurs se concentrer sur ce qu'ils font, et pourquoi.
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.