Good morning.
A man spent 80 hours on a piece of AI art, entered it in a state fair competition under his own name, and won first place. The internet declared art dead. They were wrong about almost everything. Here's what actually changed.
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AI INSIGHT
How AI Is Changing What It Means to Be Creative
Jason Allen walked into the Colorado State Fair in 2022 with a digital art submission. He won first place. The internet said art was dead.
The headlines were wrong about almost everything.
What Allen actually did: he spent 80 hours on that image. More than 600 distinct prompt variations, hundreds of rejected outputs, careful editing passes, and an upscaling run before anything went to print. His entry name on the form was "Jason M. Allen via Midjourney." He disclosed it. The judges knew.
None of that made it into the coverage.
This cycle has played out before — and not recently. Consider the track record:
Photography (1839): Painters said it would kill their craft. It didn't. It changed what they painted.
Synthesizers (1969): Traditional musicians called it cheating. Electronic music is now a multibillion-dollar industry.
Auto-Tune (1997): Critics called it the death of authentic performance. It became the sound of a generation.
CGI (1993): Animators predicted the end of hand-drawn art. Pixar is still making billions.
Every generation gets its version of this argument. What matters is not whether a new tool disrupts art. The answer to that question is always yes. What matters is what the disruption actually changes.
What actually shifted
Creating a compelling AI image is not about knowing the right software. It is about having a clear vision and the patience to keep refining until the output matches what you already see in your head.
That is not a technical skill. It is taste. And taste develops over decades of paying close attention to what looks right.
One individual rebuilt the Lord of the Rings movie trailer in Studio Ghibli animation style for $250. The result pulled 13 million views. They were not competing on tools. They were competing on the specificity of their obsession. Their imagined version of that trailer was so clear they could direct AI toward it through sheer iteration. The studios had bigger budgets and slower judgment.
Using AI as a creative thinking partner has always worked best when you bring a strong point of view. The tool needs something to aim at. What you've developed over a lifetime of paying attention to what resonates — that's the input the tool can't provide for itself.
One thing worth knowing before you start
U.S. courts have been consistent on this: AI-generated content, produced without meaningful human creative input, is not legally owned by anyone. The U.S. Copyright Office has published guidance on AI and copyright that is worth reading if you plan to do anything commercial with AI-generated work.
For personal use — printing a custom photo book, illustrating a family memory, making a piece of wall art — this changes nothing. Create what you want and enjoy it.
Where it matters: if you plan to sell AI-generated work commercially, raw, unedited generations sit on uncertain legal ground. The more human judgment that shapes the final output (prompting, selecting, editing, compositing), the stronger the argument for protection. Just don't assume automatic ownership because you generated it.
The actual opportunity
You do not need to be an artist. You need to know what you like.
You already know what a good family portrait looks like. You know what a room feels like when the light is right. You know what a holiday card should say without saying it. That accumulated judgment is now a creative input — one that AI tools can turn into something you can actually make.
The technical walls came down. The standard for what is worth making didn't.
Want to try this yourself?
"Act as a creative director. I want to create a [custom illustration / holiday card / portrait of a family memory]. Generate three distinct visual concepts I could use to prompt an AI image generator. For each concept, describe the scene, the mood, the color palette, and the visual style in 2 to 3 sentences. Then tell me which of the three you think would work best and why."
Paste that into ChatGPT or Claude, fill in your project, and see what you get. The concept that makes you think "that's it" — that's your taste doing the work.
READER POLL
Have you used an AI tool to create or edit an image?
WHERE TO GO NEXT
More on this topic, from sources worth your time:
Four Fun Things Worth Trying With ChatGPT's New Image Tool -- A practical starting point if you want to experiment with AI image creation, no technical knowledge required.
How AI Can Restore Your Old Family Photos in About 10 Minutes -- The most emotionally resonant use case for AI creative tools, and one most people haven't tried yet.
Everyday Creativity Prompts -- A collection of copy-paste prompts for creative projects you can start today.
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