It is hard to scroll through Pinterest or Instagram these days without seeing eerily flawless images: dreamlike Studio Ghibli landscapes, surreal portraits with brushstrokes that are too perfect to be real, and futuristic cities bathed in light that never existed. At first glance, they seem to dazzle and hypnotize. A closer second look reveals the uncanny perfection, the absence of story, and the realization that this was not made by a person. It was assembled by a machine.

We are witnessing a coup on artistry, which, ironically, does not encroach upon style or technique, but spirit. In this era of algorithmic creation, the question echoes louder than ever: Can AI-generated images truly be called art?

Let me be clear: these images are not born. They are built. They carry no childhood memory, no trembling hand of hesitation, no flash of inspiration that came at 2 a.m. and refused to let go. They are the product of enormous datasets scraped from the internet, billions of human-made works disassembled and reassembled into something slick, digestible, and terrifyingly hollow.

Proponents of AI art call it democratizing. They celebrate how it can generate "beauty" at the push of a button, mimic any style, and mix any genre. They compare it to a digital renaissance, some even calling it the dawn of a new art form. But, if art is merely what pleases the eye, then what have we reduced it to? Wallpaper? Reshuffling pixels cannot rival the real artistic process.

Art has always been more than an aesthetic arrangement. It is where emotion, identity, memory, and history collide. When Monet painted water lilies, he was not just capturing a pond — he was recording the play of light as he experienced it in the final years of his life. When Frida Kahlo painted herself with thorns piercing her throat, she was not performing for likes — she was bearing pain. Who or what is AI bearing pain for?

There is something deeply unsettling about our willingness to let machines replace what was once sacred. Not only because it threatens artists’ livelihoods. And not only because it steals their work. The deeper loss is philosophical. It is existential.

Why are we letting convenience rob us of creativity?

The very act of creating — the mess, the failure, the unpredictability — is human. We fall in love with flawed art because we recognize ourselves in it. When we trade that for precision, we are not gaining beauty; we are losing soul.

Some say AI is just a tool, comparable to the likes of a camera or a brush. But that comparison fails. Tools extend human intent; they do not replace it. AI does not understand intent. It does not care if the piece it "makes" moves someone to tears or leaves them cold. It has no tears. No warmth. No reason to create at all.

And still, we click, we save, we share. Not because it moves us, but because it is easy. Pretty. Quick. But I worry that something ancient is slipping through our fingers. Last summer, I witnessed Albert Bierstadt's Among the Sierra Nevada, California in the Smithsonian Art Museum in Washington, D.C. in all its glory, and I could not help but sit and stare at it in absolute awe, craning my neck to soak in every inch of its grandeur; marveling not only at its size, but the realness of it. You could see every stroke and feel the intention behind each one permeate through the painting. For centuries, humans have created not just to entertain, but to feel less alone. To say, this is how I see the world, does anyone else see it too? AI cannot answer that question. It has no emotion. No vision. No self.

So yes, I do believe AI art is unethical. Not just because it exploits the labor of real artists. It is part of a broader moral laziness we are embracing. A willingness to consume creation without caring who made it, how, or why. We should stop pretending that these outputs, however stunning, are equal to human art before its assimilation into our consumption is too far gone (although it might well be). They are echoes, not voices. Imitations, not expressions.

To call AI-generated images “art” is to flatten centuries of human striving into style guides and aesthetic filters. And the longer we pretend this is progress, the more we risk forgetting what real art, and real humanity, even feels like. AI art is a play without actors, devoid of the humanness that I feel when I look at the creation of a person, devoid of soul.

So I ask: when you next pause in front of an AI-generated masterpiece, ask yourself not “is it beautiful?” but “is it real?”

And if not, why are we so eager to replace the real with the replica?