Is AI Art Legitimate?
by Cassidy Sara
AI content is everywhere – on our social media feeds, in television commercials, even printed advertising. It suddenly seems ubiquitous and exponential. Graphic designers and marketing directors race to keep up as the industry shifts around them, while visual artists fight to protect their individual styles. Beyond the skirmishes and the slop, however, can AI-designed creations be considered legitimate artwork?
There are certainly some cutting edge figures and institutions that would argue they should. The Whitney Museum in New York has featured several AI-generated exhibits, including AARON, developed by Harold Cohen as one of the earliest artmaking AI programs, as well as the recent 2026 CULTUS by Zach Blas. In early 2025, the Getty Museum in LA made headlines by acquiring its first AI-generated artwork; a piece titled “Christian en al Amor de Calle” by Costa Rican artist Matias Sauter Morera. While Morera is traditionally a photographer, he utilized AI in his series on the secretive homosexual “pegamachos” culture to avoid risking any exposure and allow for imaginative conceptual design in creating his hyper-realistic images. The Crocker Art Museum in California featured a solo exhibition by AI-artist Alexander Reben, and the artist Elias Marrow is notorious for planting his AI-generated art in reputable museums.
One of the leading and most renowned figures in AI art is Refik Anadol, a Turkish-American media artist and instructor at UCLA. His work strives to merge art with technology and architecture using tools like immersive rooms, AI data paintings and projections, and complex data sculptures. Adadol’s work has been displayed in over 70 cities across six continents, including Machine Hallucinations: Unsupervised, which was one of the first AI-generated works ever to be displayed at the Museum of Modern Art in NYC. His generative AI project Machine Hallucinations: Sphere, ran at the Las Vegas Sphere for several months. Anadol also cofounded Dataland as the first ever museum dedicated to AI art, opening in Los Angeles in June 2026.
Still, countless arguments abound against recognizing AI-generated or assisted work as actual “art.” Many see artificial intelligence as a threat to the unique voice that is decidedly, authentically human. As existing art continues to feed into AI systems, artists have claimed to notice eerily similar reproductions of their own work coming from image generators. Images scraped from the internet without creators’ permission exploit their talent and creativity without compensation. Widespread use threatens the livelihoods of many career designers, illustrators, and artists. Lawmakers grapple with inherent questions about copyright and intellectual property rights but seem to be chasing well behind a steaming train.
For now, fully AI-generated artwork cannot be copyrighted in most of the world, with the exception of the U.K. which allows some protection for computer-generated works. This isn’t going to stop the massive creation of AI artwork, driven by ever increasing access to generative platforms. Artists like Matias Sauter Morera and Refik Anadol successfully argued that AI was just one element of the technologies used to create their work. Groundbreaking sci-fi and fantasy worlds created by the likes of Gossip Goblin (Zack London) gain millions of followers online. Skilled users of generative platforms argue that coaxing the desired visual result from the algorithm requires an art of its own. The debate continues on. And beauty will always be in the eye of the beholder.