In November 2025, Elon Musk appeared on The Joe Rogan Experience and predicted that AI would soon generate most of the world’s content. While many of us remain captivated by AI’s impressive capabilities, its real-world effects are already landing hard—especially on creators and artists like me.
The most damaging impact is the large-scale appropriation of artists’ work. AI systems have been trained on vast amounts of copyrighted material, often without permission or compensation, in a country that prides itself on strong copyright protections and the rule of law.
These costs are no longer abstract. My own website hosting fees roughly doubled overnight, rising to more than $800 for a three-year term in 2025. The annual cost of my second site, hosted on the Teachable platform, tripled from around $500 to $1,668. I cannot justify passing that increase on to my students, so I am shutting the site down and walking away from years of work invested in the platform. I expect electricity bills to be next; AI’s enormous energy demands will almost certainly push those costs higher for everyone.
Many artists, myself included, have long relied on part-time freelance work—designing book covers, album art, and illustrations—to support ourselves while developing our craft. Those opportunities are disappearing rapidly. Why hire a human artist when a $30-per-month subscription can produce similar results in seconds?
It’s reminiscent of how photography once displaced traditional portrait painters. Did you know Rembrandt was a portrait-painting machine in Amsterdam, earning a fortune for his genius? Today, hardly any portrait artists command that scale of work or pay.
Should I keep ranting?
Despite these frustrations, I still find genuine pleasure in generating a couple of AI images each day. It serves as a form of creative therapy. As an artist, I am fascinated by how these systems interpret the world and apply artistic principles. Of course, every output remains a reflection of human ingenuity and the data we have collectively created.
I do not accept the idea that AI is on the verge of true consciousness, even though that prospect alarms many people. At its core, AI is a highly sophisticated system trained by countless humans on enormous datasets. Human consciousness—interwoven with free will, ethics, aesthetics, emotion, and love—is far too complex for any algorithm to replicate. No one has solved that problem yet.
The notion that our world might be a simulated game has a certain modern appeal: it does appear to operate according to clear cause-and-effect rules. But that is only part of the picture. What makes us truly unique—and ultimately non-programmable—is the spark of individuality that resists any fully scripted simulation.
A far more immediate concern is AI falling into the wrong hands. We already live in an expanding surveillance state, and this technology is only accelerating that trend. AI is a tool. Its impact depends entirely on the intentions of those who control it. The character of human hearts, for better or worse, will determine the future we create with it.
I still do not know how to resolve the issue of stolen artistic copyright. The fair approach would be to compensate artists with a percentage of revenue, similar to the way musicians are paid for streams and playback. I doubt that system will emerge anytime soon. In the meantime, artists need to learn how to integrate AI into their professional workflows so they do not fall behind and lose their livelihoods. This is no different from earlier generations learning to use computers for formatting, design, or writing.
It’s unclear how to resolve the data center dilemma that suck all the resources out. Should the artist be responsible for it while business owners and directors of these data centers make money at our expense?
