‘Human Intelligence’ Art Movement Takes Defiant Stand Against AI

Procrastinating on her work as a book illustrator one day, Beth Spencer picked up an iPad and sketched a red hand jotting the words “created with human intelligence.” She’d seen a lot of concerned chatter about AI among fellow artists on Instagram, and she figured she’d post the drawing to her website to emphasize that everything visitors see there originates with a blood-and-bone artist.

In a Substack post, Spencer gave other artists permission to add the badge to their own sites for free—as long as they did so to spotlight work made without help from artificial intelligence. “I thought maybe two or three people would say, ‘Thanks, I’ll take one,’ because people love free stuff, right?” Spencer said. Instead, around 50 artists and writers requested the below image on the first day.

Sensing she’d hit a collective nerve, Spencer then posted her image to Instagram and invited other artists to draw it in their own style using any materials (save for AI, of course). Popular “Draw this in your style” challenges fill the social media platform, but this marked Spencer’s first time hosting one.

“It’s just exploded,” the artist said over the phone from her home in Memphis, Tennessee, where she’s illustrating a children’s picture book, due out in March. “It’s been really exciting to see all the creativity that could come from a scrappy little five-minute sketch that I made when I was supposed to be doing work.”

Since Spencer first announced the challenge in early June, nearly 1,200 artists, illustrators and designers have contributed their own versions of her drawing to a growing gallery of unique images that all underscore the same defiant message: Amid the proliferation of art by algorithms, human artists cannot, and should not, be replaced. (Click on the images in this article to learn more about the featured artists.)

“It’s not saying AI should be banned,” Spencer clarified of the initiative. “It’s more pro-human than anti-tech.”

Submissions to the human intelligence challenge have flooded in from the U.S., U.K, Spain, Germany, Italy, Brazil and beyond as generative AI continues to provoke passionate responses from artists across genres. Some hail it as a promising new tool that can steer them in surprising and wonderful directions. Others worry companies are stealing their work to train AI datasets without credit or compensation. They fear AI will take their jobs, and possibly alter the very nature of creativity.

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The project gets to complex questions at the heart of the debate over AI and art. Can art made with artificial intelligence convey the raw human emotion and passion of a lived experience? Creatives have conflicting opinions, but not surprisingly, the artists participating in Spencer’s challenge fall in the skeptical camp.

“My work has always been created by hand, and there is no way to replicate the feelings it provokes through those hand-drawn lines and layers,” Brooklyn-based artist, author and teacher Samantha Dion Baker wrote when posting her badge to Instagram.

Artists like Baker increasingly are relying on the conduit they know best, their art, to counter the rushing AI tide. Last month, a photographer who won an AI photo contest got disqualified after he revealed he’d submitted a real photo to prove that human-generated art hasn’t lost its impact in a world of algorithms.

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Christopher Thornock, a freelance illustrator and gallery artist in Utah and a professor of illustration at Utah Valley University, said he doesn’t usually participate in “Draw this in your style” challenges. This one felt different.

“I have concerns over what might come from the use of AI imagery in my industry,” he said. “It felt like a way to show solidarity with other artists and illustrators.”

His contribution looks like it’s composed with graphite, but he made it on an iPad with the program Procreate and custom digital brushes. Many contributors to the human intelligence challenge also went the digital route for their badges. Others opted for ink, pastels, colored pencils, watercolor paint, paper collage or claymation.

Mateo Montoya’s whimsical take features a hand that looks like it belongs to a character from Nick Park, creator of “Wallace & Gromit” and “Shaun the Sheep.” The hand holds a red pencil as it completes a circle around “created with human intelligence,” the words that appear in Spencer’s original sketch.

The Colombian artist sculpted the hand out of the crafting material known as cold porcelain, then covered it with acrylic paint and dressed the arm in shirt and jacket sleeves he fashioned from fabric. He spent about two days on the project.

“What we illustrators, designers and artists do not only fulfills an aesthetic function, it fulfills a communicative function,” Montoya said over email. “Our work is a very powerful tool to express what we think and feel.”

Spencer echoes that sentiment, though she doesn’t identify as firmly anti-AI and can’t say artificial intelligence will never make its way into her artwork. AI-generated images as they currently stand, however, don’t impress her.

“They all kind of look greasy to me, like they’ve been dipped in oil,” she said. “People will get tired of seeing shiny images.”

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The human intelligence art challenge continues through the end of August, at which point Spencer plans to randomly select a winner from all entrants. That person will win a complimentary $70 annual membership to the Introvert Drawing Club, an online art community founded by Spencer that offers drawing sessions and whose 7,000 members share art prompts, tips and techniques.

It’s clearly not the prize that’s motivating artists to showcase the hands of humans in making art, however.

“I hope that our viewers see we want to connect through the works of our hands, heads and hearts,” Thornock said. “That there is experience and soul behind what we do.”