Okay, so, this whole AI art thing, it’s just a mess, a real, real mess, and it’s getting more complicated every single day like. You saw that SHL0MS thing, right? The artist, the anonymous one, he posted an image on X back in May, and he said it was AI-generated, like, inspired by Claude Monet, and he asked people to just tear it apart, you know, tell him how it missed the mark, like, as AI art. And people, oh man, people just piled on, thousands of responses, they were so confident, they were saying the colors were off, the brushwork was all wrong, there was no emotion in it, like, “zero cohesion of elements,” they said.

It was wild, just a total pile-on, and then the big reveal, the big twist, it was a real Claude Monet painting, a Water Lilies piece from around 1915, a genuine Monet. It just showed how much bias there is, like, people judge the origin of the art before they even look at the art itself, and that’s a problem for the market, right? SHL0MS even sold a real Monet, but he cropped the signature off it, and that went for $40,000 as an NFT. The market for AI art, it’s growing, like, really fast, it surged to $3.2 billion in 2024.

And they’re projecting it to hit $40.4 billion by 2033, that’s a huge jump, a massive jump. Some even say the global AI creativity and art generation market could reach $141.7 billion by 2034, which is just insane when you think about it. North America, it’s leading right now, it had over 40% of the AI art market revenue in 2024, that was about $1.2 billion. Christie’s, the big auction house, they had their first all-AI art auction in February 2025, and it brought in almost $730,000.

And there’s Ai-Da, the robot artist, her painting sold for over $1 million at Sotheby’s, so there’s real money moving here, real, real money. In 2023, the generative AI in art market was valued at $298 million, and it’s expected to reach $8.2 billion by 2033, with a compound annual growth rate of 40.5%. Visual art, that’s like 50% of this market, so it’s a huge chunk. But what makes it collectible, you know?

That’s the big question, the really big question. People can’t even tell the difference sometimes, like, 38% of the time, they can’t tell if it’s human or AI. The debate is always about intention, about emotion, does AI have that, can it have that, or is it just algorithms? Some artists, they’re seeing AI as a tool, a collaborator, something that expands what they can do, their creative potential.

But then you have others, and they see it as a threat, like, a real threat to their careers, to traditional skills, to their livelihoods. It’s also this weird thing where the more AI art there is, the more valuable human-made art might become, because of scarcity, because of authenticity. Younger collectors, like Gen Z and millennials, they’re more open to AI art, they’ve grown up with technology, so it resonates with them more. But even curators, the serious art people, they draw a line, they say there’s a difference between just typing a prompt and getting an image, and actual “serious AI art” which involves training custom models, building control systems, that kind of deep engagement.

And then there’s the whole copyright mess, it’s a total mess. In the US, art created entirely by AI, it’s not copyrightable, because copyright law needs a human author, a human touch. But if a human artist, you know, they significantly modify the AI-generated work, they add their own original elements, then those human contributions, they might be copyrightable. The US Copyright Office, they made it clear in 2023, works with “substantial AI input” are not eligible for copyright protection.

And using copyrighted material to train these AI models, that’s a huge legal gray area, there are lawsuits happening all over the place about it. It’s just a constant battle, a legal quagmire. I mean, I remember back in January 2021, I bought some GME, GameStop, at $9.78 a share on January 20, 2021. Just a small position, you know, a speculative play, and I’m just holding it, waiting for it to hit $500 again, or if they actually manage to pivot to a real digital strategy, a sustainable one, then maybe I’ll reconsider.

But until then, it’s just sitting there, like so many of these AI art pieces, waiting for someone to decide what they’re actually worth.