When Does an Artwork Stop Being the Artist’s Own?

Creativity in the Age of AI

Artificial intelligence is changing the way we create images at extraordinary speed. An image that might once have taken hours — or even days — to produce can now appear in seconds.

For artists, this raises some fascinating, and sometimes uncomfortable, questions.

What makes an artwork ours? Is it the hand that physically made it? The original idea? The creative decisions made along the way? And if an artist uses AI to alter or develop an artwork they have already created, at what point does it become something different?

These are questions I have found myself thinking about in my own art practice.

From original painting to digital edition

I work primarily in mixed media, building paintings through layers of paint, collage, texture and experimentation. I also photograph some of my original works so they can be reproduced as prints.

But increasingly, I have become interested in something slightly different from straightforward reproduction.

Sometimes I look at a completed painting and wonder what would happen if I changed the colour balance, strengthened an area, softened another, or brought greater definition to part of the image.

I may love the original painting exactly as it is — including its imperfections and accidental marks — and have no desire to paint over it.

Digital tools, including AI-assisted ones, offer another possibility: I can leave the physical artwork untouched while developing an alternative version of it for print.

The two versions shown here are a good example.

The original painting has a deliberately misty, muted quality. In the digitally developed version, the colours are stronger, the figure is more defined and the overall image has a different presence.

The composition, subject, textures and underlying artwork remain mine. But the second image is no longer an exact reproduction of the first.

So what is it?

Is it still my artwork?

This is where I think the conversation around AI becomes much more interesting than simply asking whether AI-generated art is "real art".

There is a significant difference between asking an AI image generator to create an artwork from a written prompt and starting with a physical painting that I have conceived and made myself, then using technology to explore how that artwork might develop.

In the latter case, the original composition is mine. The marks are mine. The subject, materials and visual language originated in my studio.

And crucially, the decisions remain mine.

I decide what I want to explore. I decide which changes work and which don't. I reject many possibilities. I may ask for something to be changed again, or decide that the original was better after all.

AI can offer possibilities, but it doesn't make the final artistic judgement.

The artist still chooses.

Artists have always adopted new tools

Of course, artists using technology is nothing new.

Photography transformed the way artists saw and represented the world. Printmaking allowed an image to move from one medium into another. Photographers manipulate exposure, colour, contrast and cropping. Digital artists have worked with image-editing software for decades.

Even a conventional reproduction isn't completely neutral. A painting photographed, displayed on a screen and then printed onto another surface inevitably changes. Colour, scale, texture and light all behave differently.

AI takes this considerably further because it can do more than reproduce an image. It can actively participate in changing it.

And that is where I think the distinction becomes important.

Perhaps we need better language

I've started thinking differently about how I describe these works.

If I sell the physical painting, it is the original mixed-media artwork.

If I photograph that painting and reproduce it faithfully, it is a print or reproduction of the original.

But if I use my original artwork as the starting point and then deliberately develop the image digitally — changing colour, definition, atmosphere or other elements — I think digital edition is a more accurate description.

It acknowledges both things: the work originated with my physical painting, but the resulting image has become something more than a straightforward reproduction.

As artists increasingly move between physical, digital and AI-assisted processes, perhaps these distinctions will become more important.

Transparency matters.

What AI cannot decide

One thing has become particularly apparent to me while experimenting with these tools.

AI can generate possibilities remarkably quickly. What it cannot tell me is which possibility is right.

It doesn't know why I might prefer the mistiness of an original painting, even when a digitally enhanced version appears technically more polished.

It doesn't know why an imperfect line might be important, why a strange proportion gives a figure character, or why removing an awkward element can sometimes make a painting less interesting rather than better.

Those are aesthetic decisions.

And they remain human ones.

Perhaps, paradoxically, that becomes even more important in the age of AI.

When technology can generate almost unlimited possibilities, creativity may increasingly lie in knowing what to choose, what to reject, what to change — and when to stop.

Where does the tool end and the artist begin?

I don't think there is a simple answer.

I do think artists have a responsibility to be transparent about their processes, particularly when digital or AI-assisted changes substantially alter an original artwork.

But I'm becoming less interested in the binary argument of human art versus AI art.

The territory in between is far more interesting.

For me, AI is most useful when it becomes another tool within an existing creative process rather than a substitute for that process.

The physical painting still matters. The texture matters. The accidental marks matter. The experience of making it matters.

But there can also be something exciting about taking an artwork I created and asking: What else could this become?

Artists have always experimented with new materials and new technologies. AI may simply be the newest — and certainly one of the most powerful — tools to enter the studio.

The challenge is to use it without surrendering the very thing that makes art worth looking at in the first place: human intention and judgement.

Which leaves me with the question I started with:

If an artist creates the original work, directs the changes, chooses what stays and what goes, and ultimately decides when the work is finished — where does the tool end and the artist begin?