Many people quietly worry that artificial intelligence might eventually spell the end of art itself—or at least destroy the livelihoods of human artists.

From Hollywood screenwriters marching in protest to protect their work from large language models, to robot artists like Ai-Da fetching millions at auction, the outlook for art’s future can seem bleak.

Yet the history of art offers a more hopeful perspective. When viewed from a broader historical lens, the pressure AI places on human artists appears as part of an evolutionary process that long predates its own creation.

Throughout history, technological advances—by expanding and simplifying our creative abilities—have shifted focus away from form and toward content: away from what the finished piece looks like and toward how and why it was made. Following this pattern, we can anticipate that AI will push artists to become less polished and more human, and their art will improve by becoming “worse.”

AI is certainly not the first technology to be accused of destroying art forever. When photography emerged in the nineteenth century, painters feared the worst. In 1840, after seeing a photograph for the first time, the French painter Paul Delaroche famously declared, “From today, painting is dead.”

In reality, the camera didn’t kill painting so much as force it to evolve, sparking an era of extraordinary creativity and experimentation. Movements such as Impressionism, Fauvism, and Cubism all arose in part from painters grappling with the same question: What can I do that this new machine cannot? The answer, broadly, was to depict the world subjectively, as they themselves experienced it.

Today’s artists, working in any medium, must also confront this question. Only this time, the answer will be harder to find. AI is a more versatile tool than the camera, and it is increasingly capable of operating independently. It also evolves more rapidly and along a less predictable path—so much so that even its creators cannot agree on what the future will or should look like.

Still, we have a general sense of how human artists will adapt, not least because their options are increasingly narrow. One of the few things AI cannot do—and an obvious one—is simply exist in the world: to live a life that is inevitably unique, and thereby to become inevitably unique themselves. So we can expect human-made art in the age of AI to grow increasingly personal and idiosyncratic, shaped by and inseparable from the artist’s own character and most intimate life experiences.

Whereas previous generations of artists organized themselves into schools, collectives, and cooperatives, their future counterparts will work alone—or, if together, then polyphonously, with their distinct voices kept clearly identifiable, like family members at a Thanksgiving dinner debate. Artists will also feel compelled to reinvent themselves constantly. The more you adhere to a specific style, and the more that style resembles others, the easier it will be for AI to replicate what you do.

Currently, AI has little difficulty producing images in the familiar aesthetic of a Pixar or Studio Ghibli film—one can find examples of AI imagining what The Lord of the Rings would look like with Hayao Miyazaki as director—but AI cannot reliably grasp the essence of animators who avoided a consistent look, such as Richard Williams or Satoshi Kon. Originality will no longer be art’s sole objective. Inimitability, pursued by any means necessary, will become equally important.

One medium where these shifts are already visible is the YouTube video essay. Previously, most creators used voice-overs, with their commentary set to tightly edited footage in a style tracing back to a handful of successful pioneers. Now, more and more creators are delivering their monologues on camera with minimal editing—partly to prove their humanity amid the rise of AI-generated content, but also to better lean into what sets them apart from the competition: themselves.

At present, AI frequently hallucinates. But if the technology continues to advance, we can expect a point where hallucination becomes a thing of the past. While today’s AI tools struggle to produce anything other than low-quality output, we will eventually reach a stage where AI can—without human input or feedback—create art that genuinely has something to say, that moves us and makes us think as much as our favorite human artists do. If the relationship between technology and art is often one of repulsion, with each pushing the other in opposite directions, it follows that the better AI becomes at its job—whether writing a gripping thriller or provoking heated philosophical debates in the spirit of Marcel Duchamp’s urinal or Maurizio Cattelan’s banana—the worse human artists will become at theirs.

By “worse,” I do mean inferior in quality, but not from lack of skill or effort. As AI art grows increasingly competent in both concept and execution, human artists will seek to distinguish themselves by creating art that is deliberately incompetent: flawed, incoherent, and even ineffective or confused in its aims. In contrast to AI’s polished finish, human art will also become more inchoate: unrefined, half-formed, and rough around the edges. Think rough sketches rather than completed paintings, or first drafts of novels sent to press without edits or proofreading.

Mistakes will no longer be seen as accidents, but as essential components of an AI-era aesthetic—one where failure becomes a marker of talent and success a sign of its absence. Artists will no longer aspire to be—or to be seen as—masters of their craft. Instead, they will strive to remain amateurs, preserving the untrained, uninformed spirit of their earliest work. To some extent, human art will become the mirror image of today’s AI-generated slop: wrong in ways that are almost instinctively obvious, yet hard to articulate. Only this kind of art won’t be relegated to social media outrage-bait or bizarre gambling commercials, but to galleries and festivals. The more AI can do, the more our understanding of what makes us human will evolve, and human-made art will reflect that transformation.