My Artisic Manifesto on AI

Introduction

The Core Questions

The first time I used Dall-E back in 2022, it was just a playful attempt to compensate for my lack of Photoshop skills while trying to prank a friend - displaying him perched on a fat pigeon or launching into space as a human rocket. Despite having to modify my prompts several times, I was ultimately impressed by how precisely it manifested the vision in my head with just a few clicks.

If you had told me then, that in 2025 I’d be emotionally moved by ‘AI films’ such as Aze Alter’s Age of Beyond and Léo Cannone’s Where Do Grandmas Go When They Get Lost, I would’ve been shocked. The very concept of "AI films" would have sounded like an oxymoron to me - I couldn't have imagined AI being used to generate detailed cinematic sequences, let alone communicating heartfelt messages from creators.

Yet there‘s another side to the game. Last year my Instagram feed became saturated with ‘AI artists’ showing visually stunning imagery. Despite their productivity, churning out work so rapidly (with unanimous fire emojis filling their comment sections), most of these posts slip through my head immediately. They hardly lingered in my mind, ‘okay, but so what’?

This range of media reception - from AI’s ability to deeply move audiences to its creation of disposable ‘beauty’ - raises fundamental questions about artistic creation: How has AI impacted artists’ creative process and implicitly altered audience perception? How should artists interpret AI’s role in artistic practices? These are urgent inquiries that define artistic responsibility in the forthcoming era. We need to formulate our answers to actively shape the future of art philosophy.

With this in mind, I offer not my definitive judgement, but my personal creative manifesto. Please note that this framework represents my artistic approach and vision for integrating AI into creative practice, which is open to dialogue and evolution. I will sidestep the debate about whether AI-generated content qualifies as "real art". Instead, I examine art’s fundamental aspects: its essence and purpose in human experience and connection. From these explorations emerge practical principles for artists navigating creation in the AI era.

I believe in the evolving landscape of AI-assisted art creation, the fundamental purpose of art remains human communication—both with others and with oneself (the latter being relatively more important). This requires artists to maintain creative authority, value process over mere output, preserve authentic expression, and nurture discerning taste that strengthens the human filter over AI’s output.

The Essence of Art

Tristan Wolff’s perspective on the meaning of art in the essay “AI Art is crap isn’t it?” provides what I believe to be only one part of the bigger picture. In exploring this concept, Wolff focuses exclusively on the audiences’ perspective, arguing that art gains meaning when perceived by a human mind that projects itself onto art. This is a view that, while insightful, remains fundamentally incomplete.

Art exists fundamentally as a form of communication—a complex informational and emotional exchange involving the artist, the medium, the message, and the audience. Therefore, to grasp art's true nature, we must examine this complete communicative circuit rather than isolating a single element. Wolff illuminates the reception of art but overlooks a crucial dimension at the initiating side of artistic communication: the profound relationship between the creator and their work.

Andrei Tarkovsky, one of the greatest directors in cinema, has brilliantly captured the essence and purpose of art in Sculpting in Time:

Following Tarkovsky’s vision, artists carry the great responsibility to facilitate this spirit of communion through their work. To achieve this, they must, as he suggests, “prepare to plough and harrow their soul”, cultivating a capacity for goodness that affirms what is best in humanity (love, hope, faith…)”. This understanding reveals that art possesses inherent value through creation itself—the sincere transformation of human experience into form. When artists engage in the creative process, they participate in what Tarkovsky calls "the aspiration towards the beautiful, of the ideal as the ultimate aim of art".

Therefore, art functions not only as interpersonal communication but also as intrapersonal dialogue. This internal conversation—the artist's communion with their own lived experience, values, and creative intuition—is the most vital human experience to preserve in the AI era.

Art is a meta-language… Since art is an expression of human aspirations and hopes it has an immensely important part to play in the moral development of society. It creates those tangible bonds which draw mankind together into community, and that moral atmosphere in which, as in a culture medium, art will once again germinate and flourish.

AI’s Disruption

When we oppose AI art, what are we really resisting? Though GenAI tools have been so-called "democratising" art creation, allowing anyone to generate content simply by entering text prompts, they fundamentally bypass the essential intrapersonal dialogue between the artist’s subjectivity and lived experiences. As computational neuroscientist Manish Saggar explains, "DALL-E... determines what to draw and then goes straight to making that thing at once... it is simply looking for patterned associations, it does not think at all, it only does.”

This unidirectional approach disrupts the core of artistic creation by hindering the reflective process where the initial meaning of art emerges. Unlike human artists who, as Isaac Kauvar describes, "usually don't know where [they're] going to end up" and let each creative step "inspire the next iteration", AI tools skip directly to output. What's missing is the human filter—the ability to evaluate, refine, and infuse personal meaning that highlights the end result of creation from mere generation.

When a master artist creates through sincere engagement with their material, as Tarkovsky notes, the art "transcends its creator's intentions" and "goes on living by its own laws"—a phenomenon possible only through genuine human authorship rooted in lived experience. The communication circuit completes when this authentic art reaches its audience, creating a communion where "the best sides of our souls are made known", allowing us to discover "the unfathomable depth of our own potential".

The consequences? A world saturated with AI-generated content lacking human authorship would be aesthetically abundant but spiritually impoverished—full of dazzling images but devoid of genuine communion. The generative nature of AI art makes it lack what Tarkovsky called essential to art: sacrifice, service, and transformation of human experience. This ultimately diminishes both art's communicative power and its significance to human existence.

Now, the question becomes not whether to use AI in art, but how to maintain authenticity while doing so. As Ge Wang suggests, we need to find "a balance between aspects that we would find useful to automate, versus tasks in which it might remain meaningful for us to participate". This requires artists to develop new approaches that preserve the essential intrapersonal communication while thoughtfully incorporating AI as a tool when making art.

In the Pursuit of Authenticity

To navigate the AI art landscape while preserving authentic artistic expression and the vital intrapersonal communion I’ve identified above, I propose three guiding principles: maintain creative authority, embrace process over product, and engage actively and critically with AI tools.

Maintain Creative Authority

As Ge Wang suggests in his essay "Humans in the Loop: The Design of Interactive AI Systems", the ideal relationship with technology is "a duality between automation and human interaction, between autonomous technology and the tools we wield". For artists, this indicates retaining decision-making power while strategically leveraging AI's capabilities.

Wang illustrates this principle through his student Nick Bryan's thesis project on interactive sound source separation. Rather than having an algorithm automatically separate music tracks (which often produces imperfect results), the human artist draws annotations directly onto a visualisation of a waveform, indicating where specific instruments or vocals are most prominent. These human insights guide the underlying algorithm, providing context that helps it perform better than fully automated alternatives.

This approach to maintaining creative authority applies broadly to all AI-assisted creation. It urges artists to begin with our own creative vision, informed by lived experience, before engaging AI tools. By establishing clear parameters for what you want to achieve, you preserve the internal dialogue that gives art its meaning. Remember that you, a human—not the algorithm—remain the author, with AI serving as your instrument rather than your replacement.

Embrace Process Over Product

The second principle addresses a key vulnerability in AI-assisted creation: the temptation to prioritise output over development. As highlighted, meaning in art emerges not merely from the finished product but also through the artist's engagement with materials and medium.

Taking Refik Anadol's commitment to his "Machine Hallucinations" series for example. Anadol and his studio processed massive datasets for his New York installation alone, approximately 300 million photos and 113 million other raw data points. He spent months curating datasets, customizing algorithms, and meticulously selecting outputs that align with his artistic vision. This extensive development creates a meaningful dialogue between human artistic intent and machine capability.

When we embrace process over product, we preserve the intrapersonal dialogue. So document your creative journey. Engage in multiple iterations rather than accepting first outputs. Allow yourself to be surprised by unexpected directions. Remember that the time you invest in creation becomes embedded in the work's meaning and authenticity.

Engage Actively and Critically with AI tools

This principle envisions the artist as a confident leader by encouraging a proactive and experimental approach to AI. Rather than viewing these technologies as mysterious black boxes, the artist should approach them as learnable instruments that extend creative capabilities. As AI develops rapidly, developing technical literacy becomes essential for maintaining creative authority in this shifting landscape.

Saggar's research reveals that "the most extraordinarily creative people have a strong bias toward action. They don't just (or even mainly, at first) think about what they might draw; they simply take pen to paper and start drawing". This action-oriented approach suggests that only through hands-on experimentation with AI tools can artists discover which ones can enhance their artistic expression and how to bend these tools to our creative vision.

To implement this principle effectively, artists should:

1. Invest time in understanding different models' capabilities, biases, and limitations.

2. Develop hybrid workflows that thoughtfully combine traditional techniques with AI capabilities.

3. Approach AI with the confidence of a master learning a new instrument—rather than the anxiety of someone being replaced.

I hope that by maintaining this experimental mindset, artists remain adaptable as technologies evolve, seeing each advance as an opportunity to discover new creative possibilities. This approach of continuous learning and exploration ensures the artist remains to be authoritative and release the best potential of human agency.

The purpose of art is not the release of a momentary ejection of adrenaline but rather the gradual, lifelong construction of a state of wonder and serenity. — Glenn Gould

The Path Forward

Looking forward I would imagine that at the heart of this framework lies something fundamental yet profoundly personal: human taste. While artistic creation is an outward expression of our inner world, taste operates at an even deeper and more subjective level—it's the interplay of ideas, beliefs, and convictions from which that world emerges. This unique human capacity to judge what resonates, what carries depth, and what holds authentic meaning will serve as our most crucial asset in developing the "human filter" necessary for meaningful AI-assisted art.

In my next essay, I'll explore why authenticity leads to innovation in artistic creation and how artists might nurture and sharpen their taste—the foundation of our creative authority in the age of AI. Stay tuned!