At first, AI couldn’t generate images that were realistic enough to be taken seriously. Now it can make images and videos of people that look more real by the day.
Before, you could barely generate a picture of Zendaya, but now, you can make an image of Zendaya getting married, and people will actually fall for it!
AI has slowly but surely infiltrated creative spaces. Almost every day, there’s a new example.
Recently, the U.S. release of the horror novel Shy Girl by Mia Ballard was cancelled and discontinued in the U.K after the author was suspected of using AI to write it. The author said that she didn’t use AI to write the book (which was originally self-published), but that her editor used AI to edit the version published with Hachette Book Group without telling her.
There’s Matthew McConaughey, who signed with ElevenLabs to create a Spanish-language version of his newsletter using their AI technology. Darren Aronofsky released a short-form Revolutionary War series called On This Day… 1776 that is entirely AI-generated, though it features real SAG-AFTRA voice actors.
Through AI, the late Val Kilmer’s likeness will be used in the 2026 film, As Deep as the Grave. He was unable to film this role due to illness, and will posthumously “star” in the film through an AI-generated performance, with permission from his estate and children.
Increasingly, AI-generated content is being used alongside human creativity and in conjunction with creative/artistic industries. But does AI truly belong in our creative spaces?
It doesn’t, and there’s a laundry list of reasons why.
It’s not just that data centers use billions of tons of water to run, or that it’s used to generate inappropriate images of people without their consent, or that they could be used to generate images of people doing criminal activities they never did.
AI has set a precedent that the human brain can’t be creative on its own. It’s creating learned helplessness.
Creativity is integral to who we are as human beings. In childhood, we play dress up and make believe, we create stories and dream up entire worlds. But AI cannot create from scratch; it can only take what already exists in the world or on the internet and repackage it.
In 2025, there was talk of legal action against OpenAI, whose image & video generation model Sora 2 was being used to generate images that replicated the animation style of Studio Ghibli films. The Content Overseas Distribution Association (CODA), a Japanese organization that works to protect Japanese IP like Studio Ghibli, even requested that “its members’ content is not used for machine learning without their permission.” Though human beings will always make art, the virality of trends using AI-generated images and videos is undeniable and makes the future of art feel uncertain.
So far, the response to the use of AI in creative spaces is to set guidelines around its use.
Hachette’s decision to pull Shy Girl from shelves is just one example of a company taking a clear stance on AI, and they’re not the only ones. Recently, a New York Times critic was dropped after it was discovered he used AI to write a book review. Last June, more than 1,000 authors signed an open letter against the use of AI in publishing.
These decisions will set a precedent in how publishers and companies in general handle AI-generated content in creative spaces going forward.
There will never be a time again when AI-generated material won’t exist. The cat is indeed out of the bag, but we get to decide how far it goes.