5 reasons why I'm not using AI as a Professional Illustrator
A breakdown of why I'm picking ethics over efficiency in my illustration practice and why you should also consider doing the same.
Illustration by Luke Fairhead © Soft Shock Design 2025
Before I begin, I want to state that I’m not a technophobe – far from it! When Apple released the iPad, I immediately saw the benefits of being able to create digital illustrations anywhere I went – and it has been a game changer in terms of my style, and also my workflow as a professional Illustrator.
Likewise, when VR reared it’s ugly head – apart from the terrifyingly dystopian idea of wondering around in Zuckerberg’s Metaverse – I could see some benefits to using one as a mural artist. I recently borrowed a friends’ Meta Quest 3 headset and used it to map out the line-work for my most recent mural I worked on, and I was amazed at how intuitive the whole process was. It saved me so much time and allowed me to spend more time on actually painting the mural to the best of my abilities. I still haven’t committed to investing my money into buying one just yet, but that’s a different subject for a different day!
So then there’s AI. I’ve always had a bad feeling about AI for some reason. Whether it’s the rapid acceleration of the technology, funded by the already obscenely wealthy tech lords in Silicon Valley, being shoe-horned into just about any piece of hardware or software imaginable, creating a piece of tech that is arguably worse off than it was before (I’m looking at you Google AI overview). Or maybe it’s things like Grok, the AI chatbot created by Elon Musk, that recently went on an Anti-Semitic fuelled rampage on social media platform X, praising Hitler and re-naming itself to ‘Mecha Hitler’.1 I mean, it doesn’t exactly fill me with much hope for the future.
Without going off on too much of a tangent, I wanted to use this post to look more specifically at AI’s impact on the creative industry and tell you why – despite how many times people tell me it’s a useful tool – that I will not be implementing AI into my workflow as a professional Illustrator and Mural Artist.
1. Artists are being ripped off
I guess the biggest threat to creatives is the use of what is called generative AI. Generative AI is a type of artificial intelligence that can learn from and mimic large amounts of data to create content such as text, images, music, videos, code, and more, based on inputs or prompts.2
But that limitless ‘content’ comes at a cost, as many of the images and artworks that are being used to train these generative AI models are by artists and who did not consent to their work being used to train these models in the first place. And worse still, these image generators are allowing artwork to be created in the style of a particular artist, without that artist seeing any financial gain or compensation.3
The developer of OpenAI has said “it would be impossible to create tools like its groundbreaking chatbot ChatGPT without access to copyrighted material”,4 which begs the question, why are these companies allowed to steal other peoples intellectual property without providing any financial compensation at all?
Not only are AI companies gaining financially from stealing the intellectual property of artists – it’s also opening the door to scammers who want to pose as artists online, often by selling AI generated artwork heavily influenced by other artists work, for a fraction of the price.
2. It’s super bad for the environment
As an illustrator and mural artist I am always trying to make my practice as sustainable and environmentally friendly as possible: From recycling and re-using paints and supplies, choosing a sustainable energy provider, not owning a car and using public transport – the list goes on! However, when looking into the impact AI technology is having on our planet, the numbers don’t look great.
All of that shiny new technology uses up a shit-tonne of energy. Just to give you an idea – Generating one image using AI would provide enough energy to fully charge your mobile phone.5 Huge data centres are being built by tech companies such as Google and Microsoft to keep up with the growing demand of AI technology, and as a result they are producing more emissions than ever, with Google reporting it’s greenhouse gas emissions were up 48% since 2019.6
To me, the small gains that AI technology has given some of society don’t seem to outweigh the huge impact it’s having on the destruction and degradation of our environment, and It feels like big tech is putting profit and short sighted tech advances over our health and wellbeing.
3. It could be rotting your brain
Yep, that’s right. Not only is it polluting the earth and ripping you off, it also could be making you stupid. Ok, so that’s being somewhat over dramatic, but some early studies from researchers at MIT found that people using AI to write an essay showed significantly less cognitive function than those who were not.7 This has to be taken with a grain of salt as it was only a preliminary result and requires further testing, but the initial findings are nonetheless quite intriguing. If we are not having to use our brain as much to think, it makes sense that over time our brain would perhaps not perform as well – much like your muscles would eventually atrophy if you stopped going to the gym or exercising.
One of the main things I took away from studying Illustration at Uni was the ability to think critically and problem solve. In fact, I think that’s one of the most exciting parts of having a creative job for me. Whether it’s receiving a new illustration brief or planning a large scale mural, there is usually always a research and planning phase, followed by an explorative phase of sketching out ideas, chucking things at a wall and seeing what sticks. As cheesy as it sounds, every project is a journey from conception to completion and it’s through this process that we sometimes can make mistakes and learn new techniques.
So the idea of being able to cut a few corners and simply input my ideas into a AI image generator just seems wrong and a little lazy to me – It’s taking all the fun out of the creative process, and is also pushing my work in a direction that is not fed by own thought process or desire. Sure, I could use those ideas as a springboard for my own more ‘original’ ideas but to me I would always be living with the guilt that those ideas were never truly mine. That feeling of ownership and therefore pride in my work would evaporate.
4. Lacking the human touch
So this is a shorter one, and is more focused on the downsides to someone commissioning an illustration as apposed to myself as an illustrator, but I thought it was worth including.
If a company were to contact me and ask for an illustration for a book cover for example, they would ask for the images to be of a high enough resolution for print. Typically this would be 300dpi. I would also be able to advise them on other important factors such as which colour mode they would need the image to be in, as well as being able to package the file up in the required file formats needed.
Now I’m not saying that AI hasn’t got the ability to do this, but if you were in need of some guidance and support in what it was you needed for any particular job, you would not get this service from using an AI image generator.
This is going to be rather biased as I am an illustrator, but I believe good illustrators don’t just provide an illustration but will help guide the client to make sure they get exactly what they need. It’s our job to read between the lines and go the extra mile to make the finished illustration feel more bespoke and personal. These illustrations are born from a conversation and not a prompt.
5. Questionable copyright laws
Looping back to my first point, many artists have had their work used to train generative AI models without any consent whatsoever. This has lead to some questionable copyright laws surrounding the use of AI images. In theory artists own the rights to the work they create and this is called intellectual property. In the illustration world, you would typically sell a license to use your artwork but ultimately the illustrator in question would always retain the copyright to their intellectual property, unless they decided to sell up for a hefty fee!
With AI being such a new technology, it’s still pretty much the Wild West when it comes to laws around the subject and at present there are no laws in place to protect artists from having their work used to train generative AI models. Artists are rightfully pushing back and currently there are multiple lawsuits surrounding the use of AI, with many rightly accusing AI companies of violating copyright and trademark rights.8
I recently watched an episode of ‘Justin Hawkins Rides Again’ on YouTube where Justin Hawkins speculates that in the future, legislation may be put in place that would audit musicians for the use of AI in their music. The end result being that musicians using AI would not receive as many royalties as someone who had perhaps written their music without the aid of AI. This is a really interesting, and potentially just hopeful naivety? But I think it brings up some really interesting points over the implications of using AI in your work and how it could affect artists income streams in the future.
I hope this provides a little insight into the sticky subject of AI in the creative world and why I’ve decided to steer clear of it. At the end of the day, as well as all of the ethical potholes it presents, it’s also just not as fun as getting stuck in and using good ol’ fashioned blood, sweat and tears to get the job done. I felt myself going off on a tangent quite a few times with these points so thanks for sticking with me till the end. And no, this was not written with the help of AI!
I would love to hear your thoughts and insights on this subject if you have any.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jul/09/grok-ai-praised-hitler-antisemitism-x-ntwnfb
https://www.huit.harvard.edu/ai
https://news.artnet.com/art-world/class-action-lawsuit-ai-generators-deviantart-midjourney-stable-diffusion-2246770
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/jan/08/ai-tools-chatgpt-copyrighted-material-openai
https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/12/01/1084189/making-an-image-with-generative-ai-uses-as-much-energy-as-charging-your-phone/
https://www.npr.org/2024/07/12/g-s1-9545/ai-brings-soaring-emissions-for-google-and-microsoft-a-major-contributor-to-climate-changehttps://theconversation.com/mit-researchers-say-using-chatgpt-can-rot-your-brain-the-truth-is-a-little-more-complicated-259450
https://hbr.org/2023/04/generative-ai-has-an-intellectual-property-problem