A piece of A.I.-generated artwork titled Théâtre d'Opéra Spatial, which controversially won a prize at the 2022 Colorado State Fair.note
"Master, current web searches suggest it's popular for people to get AI to generate novels. It took me a whole month to generate a short horror story for you. Please go to 'This Month's Power Bill' to read it."
A.I.-Generated Artwork refers to digital art created by man-made computer algorithms. This is accomplished through the use of "machine learning": existing pieces of art are studied by an Artificial Intelligence, which uses them to generate shapes, patterns, and images.
Though A.I.-generated art has been experimented with for decades, it has grown increasingly notable in 2022 and onwards due to its usage by large corporations (Google, Microsoft, etc.) and its integration with popular art applications. Improvements in art-generating algorithms have led to various advancements, such as imitations of different artstyles, text-to-image programs, and increasing accessibility. Many A.I.-generated art programs are currently available for personal use.
There are several types of A.I. art-generation programs, including:
- Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs): Programs which produce "new" images with the use of a two-part system. GANs are split into a "generator" and a "discriminator"; the generator attempts to create patterns based on input data (in this case, other artwork), while the discriminator discards the generator's data if it is deemed unoriginal or implausible.
- Diffusion Models: Programs which, similar to GANs, produce "new" imagery based on what they've learned from existing ones. Diffusion models train through the addition and removal of "noise" to imagery, with which it learns to alter and manipulate to create new pictures.
- Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs): Programs which attempt to mimic the human brain's pattern recognition abilities. CNNs are designed to remember and reproduce various patterns and features from the artwork used to train it. In doing so, it learns how to differentiate various parts of images from one another.
- Neural Style Transfers (NSTs): Programs designed to mimic various artstyles. NSTs are given two images (a "content" image and a "reference" image) and trained to implant the artstyle of the latter onto the imagery of the former.
Once an image has been generated by an A.I., it is often altered in various ways to refine the way it looks, often by human artists utilizing digital art tools or customized algorithms. A.I. has also been used to enhance or alter existing human-made art, changing its style or shifting certain elements of it. This has led to the creation of the term "A.I.-assisted art".
While A.I. programs had initially become notorious for their ability to generate imagery and (later) visual artwork, they since expanded to other types of creative works, such as text, music and video.
Though A.I.-generated artwork has been celebrated for its technological achievements, it has also been sharply criticized by a number of artists and creative professionals. Most commonly, it has been accused of being unethical, unskilled, and devaluing to creative fields. Among professional creators, opinions can vary wildly. Proponents have included the likes of James Cameronnote , Ridley Scott, and Gareth Edwards, while opposition has included the likes of Guillermo del Toro, Mike Mignola, and Dana Terrace. The debate around A.I. can often be a very heated topic, with some art sites who have implemented generation support, such as ArtStation, DeviantArt, and Pixiv, having faced backlash, protests, and even potential lawsuits. This has led to some websites, such as Inkblot, Fur Affinity, and Newgrounds preemptively banning the usage of A.I. art on their platforms. In 2026, Bandcamp became the first music streaming platform to ban A.I.-generated songs. Companies such as Celsys (creators of Clip Studio Paint) have withdrawn their plans to include A.I.-integrated tools after backlash from many of their users.
Worth noting is that many jurisdictions, including the United States, consider A.I.-generated images to be uncopyrightable due to being created by a nonhuman entity, although a few countries do allow humans to claim copyright over A.I.-generated works.
Popular examples of A.I.-generated artwork programs include GPT Image, Stable Diffusion, PlaygroundAI, Midjourney, DeepDream, and WOMBO. For music, the best known are Udio and Suno AI; for video, Sora, Google Veo, and Dream Machine. For text, common large language models are used, such as GPT, DeepSeek, and Gemini. See A.I.-Generated Content for examples of use. See also Synthetic Voice Actor.
You can also check out TV Tropes' robots.txt
file, to see which AI scrapers are disallowed.
Works that discuss A.I.-generated artwork:
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Advertising
- An ad for BODYARMOR sports drinks compares creepy-looking A.I.-assisted videos to the brand's comparatively "real" sweeteners and flavors, declaring that "nothing in sports should be artificial".
- Another ad for the animated film Despicable Me 4, which ran during the Super Bowl, depicts a group of Minions messing around with A.I. image generation, while poking fun at the technology's quirks.
Anime & Manga
- A Does This Remind You of Anything? case in Alma-chan Wants to Be a Family!: One chapter has Alma (a Robot Kid) helping a manga artist for symbolic pay (starting with backgrounds, but soon creating the whole manga herself) until her parents tell her to return home, with the artist stating she forgot how to even draw "thanks" to Alma's assistance.
- Most songs in the Martian music industry in Shinichiro Watanabe's Carole & Tuesday are AI-generated, allowing the main characters who write their own by hand to stand out. His earlier Macross Plus also touches on AI music, but more in a "novelty (sentient) robot artist" way.
- Doraemon has two examples that predates the rise of AI generated content:
- One story has Nobita creating his own magazine and needing stories for it so Doraemon gets out a gadget that can help generate such material. Nobita places an Astro Boy manga and tells the computer to generate a story with similar genres. The end result leads to it spawning out a story with a Captain Ersatz-looking Astro Boy on the front cover, similar to how modern day AI prompts would often generate Off-Model illustrations of fictional characters.
- Another story has Nobita using a gadget that takes his friends’ likenesses and using them for a movie he’s making. But when he shows the film and the credits roll, the gadget is credited in every role and all his friends call him out for his laziness.
Comic Books
- Absolute Superman contains noticeable commentary on generative text. Students are required to use such tech in Kryptonian schools, demonstrating the planet's Creative Sterility. Also, this continuity's Brainiac, who is an evil robot, disguises itself as a ChatGPT-like device and trolls people by deliberately misinterpreting their inputs.
- Judge Dredd: The "Kenny Who?" plotline is about a comic book artist who gets replaced by a machine that could draw and write his stories. What makes this interesting is this story was published in 1985 and was originally a satire about creator rights.
- Marvel Comics: In Marvel Swimsuit Special: Friends, Foes and Rivals, the heroes find out that MegaCorp Roxxon published a "Roxxon Swimsuit Special" featuring pics of the Avengers, and heroine Nadia Pym comments that the pictures are all A.I., and that Roxxon's "A.I smut" could revive the publishing industry.
- Prez: Fred Wayne is a trillionaire whose fortune was made possible by the Wayne Algorithm, which writes every work that can be written in English. A supercomputer removes the junk texts, leaving Wayne's employees to publish and patent what the Algorithm writes.
- Steps in Creativity: The Macasso Glove is a tool that allows people to make pictures based on a prompt. Emi Horii refuses to use it, instead opting to make art manually with her feet. By the end of the comic, people stop using the Macasso glove due to it causing serious injuries.
Comic Strips
Films — Animated
- Technological Threat is a 1988 short film where 2D-animated Tex Avery-esque wolf animators are replaced by CG-animated robot animators called "dweebs". When only a single wolf is left, he rebels against the dweebs.
Films — Live-Action
- The Last Screenwriter is one of the first films written using artificial intelligence and is itself about a human screenwriter who encounters an AI scriptwriting system and finds that it matches his skills.
- Tricky & The Cereal Killers involves a teenager uploading her grandpa's cereal mascot animation cels to an A.I. video meme generator in hopes of reaching out to him, only for the A.I. to bring corrupted, murderous versions of the mascots into the real world.
- Gary and Wyatt create Lisa in Weird Science (1985) by scanning in magazine photos and books and hacking into a big government mainframe for the processing power, which is arguably very similar to training an AI character.
Literature
- Roald Dahl wrote a short story in 1954 titled “The Great Automatic Grammatizator”, about a computer engineer and unsuccessful writer named Adolph Knipe and a businessman named John Bohlen who develop a machine that can write based on input from human operators. While the story was written all the way back in 1953 as a satire of how mechanization displaced artisanship when it comes to physical goods, it's eerily prescient regarding not only the capabilities of generative AI, but also the discourse surrounding it. The machine is used to churn out Extruded Book Products, using pedals and levers to adjust subject matter, lewdishness, etc. until half the books published in English are from the machine. The publishing company pays authors to give the use of their name and no longer write anything themselves.
- A 1965 short story by Pierre Gamarra, "La Machine d'Onésime", involves the titular inventor making a machine that can write great books in the style of past authors. Despite their quality, the manuscripts are rejected by publishers for their derivative nature. The inventor's friend suggests that Onesim can command the machine to write in 'his' (Onesim's) style, but he reveals that he already tried it: the new electric brazier that made him famous and rich was invented by his machine asked to write a "philosophical treatise in Onesim's style".
- Nineteen Eighty-Four: The Minitru uses novel-writing machines, kaleidoscopes and versificators to generate literary works. A sub-section, Pornosec, where Julia worked, uses only six different plots it switches around to create pornographic novels for the proles. Notably, part of the point in this case presumably is the bad quality, as The Party need to give people something to occupy their free time but don't want to improve quality of life any more than strictly necessary.
- A 1964 short story by Harry Harrison, "Portrait of the Artist", involves a veteran comic book artist (well, given the already very high automation of the industry by the events of the story, now more like a layout designer and corrector) being finally laid off in favour of a new machine controlled by a cheap new hire that can draw better than him, using styles of great artists of the past.
Live-Action TV
- Black Mirror: "Joan is Awful" has the in-universe Joan Is Awful show be generated by a "quantum computer", where the characters aren't being "acted" but actually using the licensed likeness of real actors.
- John Oliver talks about A.I. images in an episode of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, where he places special focus on Midjourney generations involving himself. Part of the episode revolves around a user who generated images of John Oliver marrying a cabbage, accidentally eating it, and scattering its ashes into the ocean. He ends the episode by marrying a cabbage for real.
- A Man on the Inside has a joke in the second season where Charles uses A.I. in a presentation, and regrets doing so because of how many thumbs it gives him, and writes it off as useless.
- The Prisoner (1967) episode titled "The General" was about a supposed revolutionary speed learning program through rote memorization; as it turns out, it is a sinister plot by Number 2 as a form of mind control by bombarding its subjects with facts without requiring them to use any critical thinking. It is revealed that this "General" is a supercomputer that is trained on works of literature and gives an answer to any question asked. Number 6 realizes its fatal flaw by asking it "why?", a question that it cannot answer and as a result overheats and explodes. This episode was written and premiered several decades before ChatGPT was developed which functions similarly to how the General was depicted here.
- In the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "11001001" which aired in 1988, Riker gives verbal commands to the Enterprise's computer to generate a jazz club environment on the holodeck where he can play his trombone. We see him gradually refining the prompt, changing the setting and the size of the audience, and then fussing over the details of a female character until he starts experiencing Perverse Sexual Lust towards her.
- The Framing Device for the short-lived sketch show Turn-On is that it was the first computerized TV show. In the available episodes, two men operate a console that generates very short, often nonsensical, skits featuring actors and props in a Blank White Void. In addition, many bits are capped off by some sort of robotic laughing sound in lieu of a Laugh Track.
Music
- In Kendrick Lamar's Drake diss tracks "Not Like Us" and "euphoria", Kendrick criticizes Drake's use of voice cloning technology to make himself sound like Tupac Shakur (whom Kendrick greatly revered) and Snoop Dogg on the diss "Taylor Made Freestyle" (which was later taken down after Tupac's estate sent Drake a cease and desist) to goad Kendrick into responding to Drake's first diss "Push Ups". This is especially ironic, as the previous year before Drake and Kendrick's feud, Drake was vocally opposed to his voice (as well as The Weeknd's) being cloned on the fan track "Heart on My Sleeve" (which was also taken down because it used Metro Boomin's producer tag at the start).
Video Games
- 007 First Light: In Nicholas Webb's penthouse office at the Webb Industries headquarters, there is a framed picture of a stylized brain — titled "Roko's Basilisk", named after the thought experiment about omniscient, vindictive AI — that is described as having been rendered by one of the company's A.I. programs (out-of-universe, it was created by a real human artist for the game). This addition is one of the many hints of Webb's Wicked Pretentious personality, along with the general commentary and critiques of the "AI boom" throughout the game's plot, where "AI" is framed as hopelessly aspirational at best, massively dangerous to modern society at worst.
- Allegorically done for Alan Wake II's Downloadable Content, "The Lake House". Cauldron Lake had been established in the previous game as manipulating and bringing to life works of art created near it, and Drs. Jules and Diana Marmont conducted experiments at the titular nearby Federal Bureau of Control outpost to try to gauge a reaction from the Lake. The first involves feeding garbage text back through a room full of chittering automated typewriters, and the second involves torturing a captive painter to paint based on thousands of primitive text prompts, neither of which are successful. Posters can also be found warning employees that "art is for analysis, not appreciation", and a manuscript page can be found describing the art around the Lake House as "not art, just content for the machine". Rounding out the Take That! is an organically-made art piece that turns out to be much more effective in channeling Cauldron Lake's energies: as the aforementioned poor painter Rudolf Lane stood dying, he made one final painting in his own blood filled with all of the rage and despair he endured there. His final piece resonated so well that it spawned a shambling crowd of spindly monster-figures that proceeded to slaughter the FBC agents of the Lake House.
- The D4DJ multimedia franchise (including its video game arm, D4DJ Groovy Mix) has an in-universe example in Lumina Ichihoshi, an A.I. Virtual Celebrity who produces music. However, this character, a Benevolent A.I. who is an actual character and was created from a secret conspiracy, is explicitly distinguished from realistic LLMs, which Esora's (the resident Lonely Rich Kid) rich father's company has become interested in.
- Dungeons & Degenerate Gamblers parodies AI artwork with the AI Generated Card, which contains a lot of mistakes like the big red spade in the middle. Its gameplay effect is having its value and suit randomized on play.
Web Animation
- Fully Ramblomatic: Yahtzee discussed this topic as part of his editorial series, Semi-Ramblomatic, in "The Slippery Slope of AI in Games", prompted by minor backlash he received after The Alters (a game he otherwise heavily praised) was discovered to have used a few instances of AI-generated placeholder textures. He admits to being split: on one hand, he found that specific backlash overblown as it was used by human artists as a tool for a heavily laborious job that they otherwise put a lot of work, effort, and love into (meaning one can't say the A.I. was stealing any jobs more than procedural level generation in Roguelikes is "stealing jobs" from level designers), and that it's irresponsible to reject the entire game on principle when it's otherwise a great game with many positive lessons to teach people on game design. On the other hand, he nevertheless finds generative A.I. "existentially terrifying", scrutinizes 11 bit studios for their excuse (why even use AI to generate placeholder textures, anyway?), and agrees the practice should be questioned and rejected lest it be normalized like many other harmful practices in the gaming industry like always-online DRM and Microtransactions.
- Our Drawings: Part of the enmity between Paige and her sister Pillow is the fact that Pillow secretly used Paige's drawings to help train an AI program.
- Sonic Shorts: Played for Laughs in one Volume 11 short. Cream is picked up from school by her mother Vanilla and shows off a drawing of them she made, which Vanilla loves. SAGE (a sentient AI) then gets picked up by Eggman and shows off a drawing she made that has all the classic hallmarks of AI-generated artwork, including surreal, nightmarish anatomy.
Webcomics
- The Order of the Stick uses the stereotype that AI models can't make good-looking hands for a gag where a shapeshifting monster turns into a human with realistic-shaped hands, but because everyone else is drawn with three thin-line fingers, they mock the monster for looking "gross" and "always get[ting] the hands wrong". Also counts as Fourth-Wall Portrait.
Web Video
- Blooms did a video investigating various YouTube content farm channels that use a combination of AI and outsourced workers from developing countries. While South Park is the most common, similar channels have been made for The Simpsons, SpongeBob SquarePants, and Family Guy. They tend to use stolen thumbnail styles and the title format "The [Show] Episode About [X]". In a follow-up video, he got testimonies from workers employed at the channels, he found that while the videos are human-written, they are heavily guided based on a template generated with ChatGPT, which the producers did not want the writers to stray too much from.
- Cr1TiKaL submits various A.I.-generated art prompts in his videos "AI Art is Scary" and "AI Art is Taking Over".
- CYBERGEM's "Raiden Warned About AI Censorship" video is a dialogue between several major characters of Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, based on an endgame conversation in the original MGS2 in which GW, an AI created by the the government conspiracy group The Patriots, declares their intent to control information flow to create the global narrative they want, but instead posits the conspiracy theory that generative A.I. is actually a military weapon used to spread misinformation in a similar way. GW then goes on about how this kind of A.I. was leaked to the public on purpose with the intent of making people paranoid about whether what they see on the Internet or even in real life is real or not, so that GW can present their "solution": Requiring each human user to be verified as a human at all times and having anything they output be cryptographically signed with their credentials in the event that whatever they output is deemed problematic, thus putting an end to online anonymity once and for all. Ironically, as noted in the video description, the vocalizations were made with a voice-cloning AI in order to get the point across that one can't trust anything they see online to be human-made content as opposed to an A.I.-generated construct.
Raiden: Snake! Snake! Wake up! It's an emergency! Rose knows about the deepfakes! Snake! SNAKE! I guess he stayed up late AI-catfishing again...
- Exploring Lost Wads: A major part of the plot involves Michael exploring maps created/pulled by something called Osiris, which appears to be a program for generating Doom (1993) wads. There are also videos on the Obscure Tech Videos channel (a channel that can only be found by googling Nexearch as part of the Alternate Reality Game elements of the series) showing the Nexearch Image Terminal program, which is used in order to generate images.
- Jimmy McGee's video essay "The AI Revolution is Rotten to the Core" discusses that the problem with AI-created media isn't so much how it generates the medium it's being used for, but how it's being used to masquerade the hundreds of man-hours spent to improve on and contribute to the database that allows it to work by attributing its growth to itself, whether positively or negatively.
- JonTron discusses A.I.-generated artwork and videos, (alongside other A.I.-related web content) in "The A.I. Episode (Chat GPT Takes Over The World)", where he worries about the upcoming A.I. revolution.
- DJ "LegalEagle" Stone dissects some of the legal issues around A.I.-generated images in "A.I. Versus The Law" and to a lesser extent in "NFTs Are Legally Problematic". Besides the currently unresolved legality of scraping image databases for the basis of the machine learning networks, US common law states that only humans can hold a copyright: Stone cites the "monkey selfie" case, where PETA argued unsuccessfully that a macaque who stole a photographer's camera and accidentally snapped a selfie deserved copyright to the image. It's therefore possible that any A.I.-generated image automatically enters the public domain.
- The Needle Drop: In addition to videos on the side "fantano" channel that regularly express condemnation for generative AI art, the topic was naturally addressed in a main channel review of Tyga's $tarface — whose vast majority of music was AI-generated — titled "Tyga's $tarface is NOT MUSIC". The review not only concerns the criticisms host Anthony Fantano has on the music itself, but also the conception and poor ethics behind it, considering the album to be representative of the kind of lazy, incurious, exploitative individuals that are the only winners in a world where generative AI is propagated.
- Chris and Zach of OneyPlays published a video titled "MAKING ART WITH AI", where they use DALL-E to generate images ranging from "Peter Griffin eating a deer" to "Donald Trump in H. R. Giger style".
Zach: Now, do you think this is a good idea, Chris? Does this, like, scare you?
Chris: Yeah, it really does, because it's gonna put a lot of people out of a job... but god damn, does it look cool! - Shadiversity addresses the A.I.-art controversy in "STOP THE LIES! - A.I. made art DOES NOT STEAL art!". Being a hobbyist who uses A.I.-art generation, Shad agrees that such programs can be used for unethical purposes, but argues that the programs themselves are not at fault. He states that A.I.-art programs don't inherently "steal" other artists' works, believing many examples of A.I.-art being similar to existing artwork are due to misuse by the individuals using the programs.
- In "Doomed To Be Replaced", Solar Sands offers harsh criticism of A.I.-generated art programs, stating his belief that their overuse will eventually spell the end of human artists' careers. He also worries about the state of the datasets used to train A.I.-art programs, as their large size makes them impossible to feasibly curate for abusive content or intellectual-property violations.
- SomeOrdinaryGamers: Mutahar covers the topic of AI as he has a vested interest in technology news. While he is not completely against the use of AI, he is critical of the use of generative AI as a replacement for creative works. He also has a visible hatred of AI generated YouTube content farms.
Western Animation
- Aqua Teen Hunger Force: In Scrip2 2i2le: The Ts Are 2s after Master Shake tries and fails to write his own movie script, he enlists the help of a group of coffee-machine robots to generate a movie for him...the result being barely legible nonsense, where all the characters are constantly drinking coffee for no reason.
- Godzilla: The Series: An interesting example as one episode predicted AI generated images twenty years before their use became public by having Randy attempt to create a logo by scanning existing artwork and expecting the computer do all the work. The output is an illegible mess of vaguely familiar shapes (which would be the real result before about 2018).
- Lyla in the Loop: "The Artist Formerly Known as Liana" serves as an allegory for AI art. Stu, who functions like an AI chatbot, creates art for Liana, and she accidentally submits it as her own. Liana's teacher tells her that the art is a collaboration between Stu and Liana, with Liana coming up with the idea and Stu interpreting it in his own way, and they both get credit for the art. The episode as a whole is pro-AI art, as long as it's disclosed that AI had a hand in creating it.
- Rick and Morty: In "Ricker Than Fiction", after the titular duo get disappointed by the direction of the Maximum Velocitree franchise, Rick develops his own robotic movie-making machine as a way to give the series a better ending, only for him and Morty to get sucked inside the resulting film.
- The Simpsons:
- The premise of "Bart's Birthday" is that a generative AI program known as HackGPT tries to write a satisfactory finale for the series, but Bart ultimately refuses to go along with the idea.
- The first act of "Keep Chalm and Gary On" has Principal Skinner and Superintendent Chalmers trying to crack down on students using "CheatGPT" to write essays for them. Lisa is outraged when she finds out Bart submitted an AI-generated essay and got an A on it, and asks Homer to explain why this is bad. Homer reads off an explanation of how using AI can reduce one's critical thinking skills... that he AI-generated himself.
- Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Chrome Alone 2 — Lost in New Jersey is a critique of AI in general, as a toy company named Authentic Imitations have made bootleg toys of the Turtles without their knowledge, with said toys looking misshapen and Off-Model. The main culprit behind all this is Chrome Dome (a reimagined villain from the 1987 cartoon), whose whole purpose is to capitalize on popular trends, in this case the Turtles themselves, and his backstory seems to copied from various movies and comic books. Donnie even uses ChatGPT to try to find what to get Splinter for Christmas but gets a not-so-helpful prompt. At the end of the short, Ralph outright states "AI Sucks!"