The Role of the Artist in the Age of AI
Creating what machines cannot feel.
A few days ago, I attended a thought-provoking talk hosted by Feminin Pluriel | Paris, hosted by Charlotte Delafond.
A simple yet powerful question was asked:
What becomes of art in the age of AI?
Art exhibition with Julia A. Etedi new body of work at Porte B. Gallery in Paris. Photo : Amandine Goetz.
I left feeling inspired, unsettled… and oddly reassured.
Because more than ever, I believe the artist’s role is essential in our technologically shifting world.
AI and creation: another artistic revolution?
This is not the first time art has faced a technological upheaval.
When photography emerged in the 19th century, it disrupted painting entirely: reproducing reality was no longer its central purpose.
This allowed new visual languages to bloom — centered not on what is seen, but what is felt.
In 1912, Wassily Kandinsky wrote in Concerning the Spiritual in Art:
“Art must express what the technical image cannot say.”
From this came abstraction — a movement that liberated color and form from imitation to explore emotion, soul, and interiority.
Today, with the rise of artificial intelligence, we are facing a similar shift.
AI-generated images are fast, impressive, visually flawless.
But something essential is missing.
What AI cannot generate: presence, soul, human doubt
AI doesn’t feel.
It doesn’t doubt.
It doesn’t wonder.
It doesn't carry the weight of memory or the tremble of joy.
But art is often born in those very places: hesitation, longing, intuition.
Not from perfection — but from process, risk, fragility.
An artist doesn’t produce.
An artist experiences, searches, reveals.
And from that vulnerability emerges something no machine can mimic:
a work inhabited by emotion, by breath, by life lived.
Abstraction as a response to a digitized world
In my own practice, I work with emotional abstraction, organic forms, layered textures.
I don’t aim to impress — I aim to create presence.
Each painting is a suspended moment.
Each commission is a meeting, a shared space of sensitivity.
I translate what’s felt but not spoken, and I offer it back through color, form, and gesture.
In a world where the image becomes ever more synthetic, I believe in the vibration of what’s real.
An abstract painting may seem “useless” to an algorithm.
But for the viewer who feels it — it becomes unforgettable.
Defending a slow, human ecology of creation
In response to the speed, automation, and visual overload of our time,
I choose to embrace:
Slowness
Material
Chance
Intuition
Imperfection as depth
To create today is a gentle resistance.
It’s a way to protect the value of care, nuance, and mystery.
A reminder that art is not output — it is experience.
🔮 And tomorrow?
AI will continue to evolve.
It may support us, surprise us, challenge us.
But it will never replace the singularity of a human gaze shaped by life, memory, contradiction.
Perhaps the artist’s role today is to be exactly that:
A human voice in a world of imitation.
A voice that hesitates, that feels, that reaches.
A voice that seeks connection — not just creation.
Golden Haze by Julia A. Etedi. Photo : Amandine Goetz.
Julia A. Etedi at the opening of her show at Gallery Porte B. in Paris.