When digital art was first emerging as a discipline, there was a lot of fear mongering about it and many concerns were raised about digital art supplanting traditional art. Those who were staunchly against digital art branded it as a lazy way out, due to the widely held view that software programs such as Photoshop “make the art for you.” Anyone who has used Photoshop, Procreate, or any other program of that nature will know this is not true. What the program can do is give you shortcuts; it can save you a lot of time when picking and mixing colors, it can give you the freedom to move pieces in your composition around, and it can make shading and linework a lot crisper. But at the end of the day, the program cannot conjure a piece of artwork into being; it is merely a medium that the artist must learn their way around just as they would learn how to use any traditional medium. In much the same way, Microsoft Office and other word processors make writing more convenient. Thanks to these programs writers can bring their piece of writing on the go with them. They can effortlessly change fonts and formatting, or add visuals.

Technology has never been the enemy of artists or writers and in fact it has become a mainstay in our profession. Any creative who wishes to seriously be successful in the modern world has to have at least a basic knowledge of how this technology works since they are used in the field. The issue is not the programs themselves; at this present moment, as we cannot yet attribute sentience to AI, it is an indifferent entity, worthy of neither our scorn nor admiration. Rather, it is the vapid anti-intellectual and anti-art attitudes, that have been exacerbated by the invention of AI, that are worrisome.

Laquintano, Schnitzler, and Vee equate AI with Microsoft Word. And while it is true that Microsoft Word can be used in harmful ways, this technology is utilitarian, whereas the kind of generative AI discussed in this article has an ajenda built into it. (granted, there are arguments to be made that potentially every software has an ajenda, but I’m tabling that longer discussion for now.) Until recently, technology was used in service of ideas. Now, it is used as a way of bypassing the thinking process altogether, and this is why I argue that it has no place in the classroom.

The article makes the argument that a kind of “literacy” is required to use this technology, which in my opinion is an insulting perversion of that term. Yes, prompts fed into the AI have to be fine-tuned. But that, in my view, is not remotely on the same level as doing writing exercises in class or doing group work. Any “critical thinking” students are doing, is about the logistics of using the AI. It is like teaching someone how to use a pencil and paper- or teaching someone how to use Microsoft Word- but not teaching them how to write. Refining prompts becomes less about decision making and more about figuring out how the program works, which is not a skill they can really apply to anything other than becoming more well versed in the program.


At some point, this technology stops being the “tool” this article insists it is, and becomes a weapon. And I fear we have already arrived at that point. Artists and writers have legitimate reason to be fearful of this technology, because it undermines the hours they spent honing their craft (not to mention leeches off their labor, but I won’t get into that here). Yes, technology has its place, and no one knows that better than an artist- but there is a real danger in conditioning people to have a codependent relationship with it.