In October 2022, an artist named Jason Allen entered a digital art competition at the Colorado State Fair. His entry, a sweeping fantasy painting called Théâtre D'Opéra Spatial, won first place in the digital art category. When people learned he had used an AI image tool called Midjourney to create it, a fierce debate exploded online. Was it really art? Did he cheat? The judges said he had followed the rules — he had disclosed AI involvement. The internet disagreed loudly. That single blue ribbon sparked a worldwide argument about what it means to make a picture.
An AI image generator is a computer program that has studied hundreds of millions of photographs, paintings, and illustrations from the internet. By studying so many images, it learned patterns: what a "dog" looks like, what "sunset" colours tend to be, how shadows fall. It stored all that learning as billions of tiny numbers inside itself.
When you type a prompt — a short description like "a golden retriever sitting in autumn leaves, oil painting style" — the AI uses those numbers to build a new image from scratch that matches your words. It is not copying any one picture. It is creating something new using patterns it absorbed from many pictures combined.
The most common technique modern AI image tools use is called diffusion. Here is how it works in plain language:
The name comes from physics. When you drop a drop of ink into water, it slowly spreads out (diffuses) until the water is evenly coloured. AI diffusion runs that process backwards — starting from the evenly-spread "ink" (random noise) and finding the original "drop" (your image). It is a clever mathematical trick.
Released in 2021, DALL·E was one of the first AI image tools the public could try. DALL·E 3 (2023) is built into ChatGPT. It is very good at following detailed text prompts accurately.
Used by Jason Allen to win the Colorado fair prize. Known for producing painterly, atmospheric images that feel like illustrations. Operates through Discord — you type commands in a chat.
Released open-source in August 2022. Anyone can download and run it on their own computer. This openness made it hugely popular for experimentation and research.
Adobe's built-in AI, launched 2023. Designed specifically for professional creative work and trained only on licensed images to reduce copyright concerns.
When Jason Allen typed his prompt into Midjourney, he made hundreds of decisions — about wording, style, composition, and which of many generated images to select and refine. Does that count as creative work? There is no single right answer. What do you think?
The most important skill in AI image creation is writing a clear, specific prompt. A weak prompt gives a boring result. A strong prompt gives something amazing. In this lab you will practise with your AI tutor — ask it to critique your prompts, suggest improvements, or explain why certain words work better than others.
Talk to your AI tutor below. Have at least 3 exchanges to complete the lab.
In January 2023, three artists — Sarah Andersen, Kelly McKernan, and Karla Ortiz — filed a class-action lawsuit against the companies behind Stable Diffusion and Midjourney. Their argument: these AI systems had been trained on their artwork without permission and without payment. When users typed "in the style of Sarah Andersen," the AI produced images that looked uncannily like her work. She had never agreed to train any AI. The lawsuit is still ongoing as of 2024 and may reshape how AI art tools are legally allowed to work.
In law, you cannot copyright a style. You can copyright a specific painting, drawing, or photograph — the actual work — but not the general way you work. Nobody can own "impressionism" or "comic-book shading." Human artists have always learned by studying and imitating others. Every art student copies masters to develop their own eye.
The complication with AI: when a human studies Van Gogh and then paints something Van Gogh-like, they produce one painting. When an AI studies millions of images — including Van Gogh's — it can produce unlimited Van Gogh-style images instantly, for free, flooding the market and potentially replacing artists who work in a similar style.
In February 2023, the U.S. Copyright Office ruled that AI-generated images cannot receive copyright protection because they lack a human author. But what about images where a human gave careful prompts and made many creative decisions? The Copyright Office said it would evaluate these "on a case-by-case basis." No final rulebook exists yet. This is genuinely unsettled law.
AI image models learned to draw by studying enormous datasets — collections of images scraped from the internet. The best-known dataset is called LAION-5B, which contains 5 billion image-text pairs gathered from public websites. The images include professional photographs, fine art, medical scans, personal photos posted on social media, and much more.
Many artists, photographers, and designers discovered their work was included in LAION-5B without their knowledge. A website called Have I Been Trained? (haveibeentrained.com) lets people search whether their images appear in the dataset. Many professional illustrators found their entire portfolios inside it.
Some AI companies have responded. Adobe Firefly was trained only on Adobe Stock images and public domain art — images where Adobe had licensing rights. Getty Images launched its own AI generator trained exclusively on its licensed photo library. These "licensed-data" approaches represent one answer to the controversy, though critics point out that even licensing deals often do not financially benefit the original artists fairly.
Many professional artists feel AI companies profited from theft. Years of skill-building were scraped to train systems that now compete with the very artists who made them possible. Requests to opt out place the burden on creators, not companies.
Companies argue that AI training is "transformative use" — like a student learning from reference books. No single image is directly copied. The AI creates something new. They say copyright law was not written for this situation.
Many people — including young students and hobbyists — see AI art tools as democratising creativity. Suddenly anyone can create a beautiful image, not just those who spent years learning to draw. That openness has real value.
Governments worldwide are scrambling to catch up. The EU's AI Act (2024) requires transparency about training data. U.S. Congress has held hearings. Clear rules do not exist yet — which is itself a form of harm to everyone involved.
If you spent five years developing a unique illustration style, and an AI company scraped your portfolio to train its model without asking you, how would you feel? Now imagine you are a teenager who just used that tool to create your first piece of digital art. Both experiences are real and valid. Good thinking means holding both at once.
Is it okay to ask an AI to create something "in the style of" a living artist? There is no easy answer. In this lab, debate the question with your AI tutor. Present your view, push back on arguments, and see if your position changes. Good thinkers can argue both sides.
Have at least 3 exchanges to complete the lab.
In March 2023, a set of images went viral on Twitter showing Donald Trump being dramatically arrested by police officers. The images were entirely AI-generated, created by journalist Eliot Higgins using Midjourney — as an experiment to see how realistic fake news images could become. They were startlingly convincing. Within hours, millions of people had seen them. Many believed them to be real photographs. Higgins posted them with a disclaimer, but screenshots without the disclaimer spread far faster. The experiment demonstrated that the era of trusting photographs as evidence was ending.
A deepfake is an AI-generated image, video, or audio that depicts a real person doing or saying something they never actually did. The word comes from "deep learning" (the AI method) and "fake." Early deepfakes in 2017–2019 required powerful computers and technical skill. By 2023, creating a convincing fake photograph of any public figure required only a browser and a few seconds.
Deepfakes are not all malicious. Filmmakers use similar technology for legitimate purposes — like digitally de-ageing actors in movies, or bringing historical figures to life in documentaries. The technology itself is neutral. What matters is the intent and the context.
Non-consensual intimate imagery: A 2023 report by the Stanford Internet Observatory found that the vast majority of deepfake content online consists of non-consensual intimate images — fake explicit photos of real people (usually women) who never agreed to be depicted this way. This is a form of abuse. Multiple countries have passed laws making it illegal. In the UK, the Online Safety Act 2023 criminalised sharing such images.
Political disinformation: During elections in Slovakia in September 2023, an AI-generated audio clip circulated on social media appearing to show a politician discussing plans to buy votes. The clip was fake. It appeared just 48 hours before election day — too late for fact-checkers to widely debunk it. Researchers at fact-checking organisations said the timing was almost certainly deliberate.
Financial fraud: In February 2024, a finance worker at a multinational company in Hong Kong was tricked into transferring HK$200 million (about £20 million) after attending a video call where every other participant — including the "CFO" — was a deepfake. The worker had initially suspected a phishing email but was reassured by seeing familiar faces on the call. Police confirmed the case.
Before AI, creating a convincing fake photograph of a specific person required a professional photographer, a lookalike, and expensive post-production. Now it takes seconds and costs nothing. This is not just a new kind of problem — it is the same problem at a completely different scale. Scale changes everything.
AI image detection is improving, but so is AI generation. Here are current warning signs to look for:
Visual literacy — the skill of critically evaluating images — has always been important. Photographers and photo editors have manipulated images since photography was invented. What AI changes is the speed and accessibility. The solution is the same as it has always been: slow down, ask questions, and check sources before sharing. These are learnable skills.
Visual literacy is one of the most important skills of the 2020s. In this lab, describe images to your AI tutor and practise applying the detection checklist from Lesson 3. Ask the tutor to quiz you, give you scenario puzzles, or explain why certain features are red flags. Challenge yourself to think critically.
Have at least 3 exchanges to complete the lab.
When AI image tools became widely available in 2022, many professional illustrators, designers, and animators were worried they would lose their jobs. But something more complex happened. Studio Refik Anadol, a data and media arts studio based in Los Angeles, used AI not to replace human artists but to create a kind of art that had never existed before — vast living visualisations of cities, ecosystems, and human memories, displayed as enormous moving murals. Their 2023 installation Unsupervised ran at MoMA in New York, where an AI trained on MoMA's entire art collection of 200-plus years generated constantly evolving dreamlike imagery. Hundreds of thousands of people visited. The Guardian called it "the most talked-about artwork in New York." No single human could have made it — and no AI would have made it without human artistic direction.
Rather than replacing artists, the most interesting work emerging in 2023–2024 involves AI as a collaborator. Here are three documented approaches:
Production studios are using AI for storyboarding, concept art, and background generation — speeding up early creative stages. Director Guillermo del Toro has discussed AI as a "sketch pad." The 2023 SAG-AFTRA and WGA strikes in Hollywood partly concerned AI's role; new contracts now include protections for human writers and actors.
Game studio Ubisoft announced an AI tool called Ghostwriter in 2023 that generates first drafts of NPC (non-player character) dialogue. Human writers then edit and refine the output. The studio says it frees writers to focus on higher-level story work. Other studios use AI for texture generation and environment concept art.
Artists like Holly Herndon, Beeple, and the collective Obvious (who sold an AI portrait at Christie's for $432,500 in 2018) have made AI central to their practice. Many argue that the creative decisions — what to make, how to frame it, what to select — are entirely human, even when the brush is algorithmic.
Book cover designers and publishers have begun using AI-assisted illustration tools. This has sparked controversy — the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) updated its rules in 2023 to require disclosure of AI-generated covers. Several magazines banned AI submissions entirely.
This is a genuinely hard philosophical question. Creativity has always involved tools — from cave painters using ochre and their fingers, to Renaissance artists using camera obscura to trace proportions, to photographers using darkroom chemical tricks. Every generation of artists uses the technology available to them.
What seems to make human creativity distinctly valuable is intention and meaning. A human artist makes choices because they want to say something — about the world, about themselves, about their culture. AI does not want to say anything. It responds to patterns. The question of whether that distinction matters — and how much — is something society is currently working out in real time.
A 2023 report by Goldman Sachs estimated that AI could automate tasks equivalent to 300 million full-time jobs globally. Creative fields are included. But the same report noted that new types of jobs are created by new technologies — AI image tools have already created demand for "prompt engineers," AI art directors, and AI ethics consultants that did not exist five years ago. History suggests technology transforms work rather than eliminating it, but transitions are genuinely difficult for real people in the middle of them.
As you complete this module, consider these questions that do not have simple answers:
The fact that these questions are hard is not a reason to avoid AI tools. It is a reason to use them thoughtfully — with awareness of the debates, respect for the artists involved, and your own creative intentions clearly in mind. The best outcomes happen when human judgment and AI capability work together, not when either one operates alone.
You are the artist. Your AI tutor is your creative assistant. In this lab you will plan — in detail — an original artwork or creative project that uses AI image generation as part of the process. Think about: what you want to say, what style suits it, what prompts you would use, and how you would make the final creative decisions yourself.
Have at least 3 exchanges to complete the lab. This is your creative statement — be specific and ambitious.