It's not about the individual artist
At the vendor market today, my wife was speaking with two women about one of my Seamus Ailin books for children. At some point, one of them told the other, in a rather elevated tone, “I avoid anything AI. I’m an artist.”
Her mother seemed a little taken aback. My wife was stunned into silence. And I, overhearing it, had two immediate thoughts.
The first was simple enough: "where can I see your work"?
The second was more practical: if I were to hire a traditional illustrator at standard rates, I would likely have to charge two or three times what I currently charge for my books. As things stand, I only make a modest royalty per copy. The economics are not mysterious. They are simply unforgiving. Unless I found an illustrator willing to work on a royalty split rather than an up-front fee, the math would collapse the project before the first copy ever reached a reader.
That is not bitterness. It is arithmetic.
When my wife later asked what she could have said in response, I told her the truth. I come to this work not only as a writer, but as someone whose professional life was rooted in technology. I spent decades in IT and project management, and my academic work touched Human Computer Interaction, an area closely related to the larger history of digital systems people now loosely group under “AI.” So for me, using these tools is not some strange detour away from my background. In many ways, it is an extension of it.
And I am perfectly candid about my limitations.
I cannot draw well. Visually, I am not a hand illustrator, and I do not pretend to be one. What I can do is write. I can describe a scene, a mood, a posture, a season, an expression, a color temperature, a piece of emotional atmosphere. I can tell you what I want the image to feel like. That is my actual craft. So when someone asks who does my illustrations, I answer plainly: I create the visual direction, and I use an AI tool to render it.
That strikes me as more honest than pretending the image emerged from skills I do not have. It also fits the broader way the U.S. Copyright Office now talks about AI-assisted work: the use of technology in producing works of authorship is not new, and copyright questions turn on the degree of human contribution that remains perceptible in the final work. The Office has also said that people may claim copyright in their own original contributions to works containing AI-generated material. In other words, the presence of a tool does not erase authorship by itself. The real question is what the human being actually contributed.
To me, that is not conceptually different from programming a CNC router to cut a pattern, using a laser to engrave a design, or setting up a 3-D printer to produce an object from a digital model. The creativity lies in the concept, the instruction, the refinement, and the judgment. The machine performs part of the execution. That does not eliminate human creativity. It relocates part of it.
In that sense, AI is less a replacement for vision than a translation mechanism for people whose ideas exceed their manual drawing ability.
And history is full of examples of artists’ tools changing over time.
Portable metal paint tubes made oil paint far easier to transport and helped painters work outdoors more freely; art historians routinely connect that change to the working habits associated with Impressionism. Photography, too, was long treated by many as artistically suspect before becoming an accepted medium in its own right. The pattern is old: new tools arrive, purists complain, standards wobble for a while, and then the creative world absorbs the tool and keeps moving. Art did not die when paint tubes became portable. It did not die when cameras appeared. It did not die when digital tools arrived. It is not dying because writers and publishers now use AI.
The same basic dynamic has repeated over and over. The Copyright Office’s 2025 report explicitly says that the use of technology in producing works of authorship is not new. That matters. AI may be controversial, uneven, overhyped, or misused in some cases, but it did not invent the relationship between creativity and tools. It simply pushed that old relationship into a new and highly visible form.
None of this should be mistaken for hostility toward traditional artists. In fact, just yesterday, our wedding anniversary as it happens, I bought my wife a pair of hand-painted earrings from a fellow vendor whose work I genuinely admire. When I can support working artists directly, I do. Gladly.
The issue is not whether human-made art has value. Of course it does.
The issue is whether every independent creator can afford custom commissioned work at professional rates for every project they wish to bring into the world.
Most cannot.
Self-publishing sounds romantic until the spreadsheet shows up. On Amazon KDP paperbacks sold through Amazon marketplaces, the stated royalty is 60% of list price minus printing cost, while KDP Expanded Distribution pays 40% minus printing cost and applicable taxes or withholding. Barnes & Noble Press states a 55% royalty rate on print books minus per-book printing cost. So the author is not simply pocketing cover price minus a little pocket change. The platform takes its share, printing comes off the top, and what remains still has to absorb editing, cover work, formatting, proof copies, advertising, samples, and the long list of production costs that never look small when you are the one paying them. For illustrated self-published books, custom art is often not a matter of taste. It is a matter of whether the book can be priced low enough to sell at all.
Now, to be clear, if I knew a gifted illustrator who loved the work, understood the audience, and was willing to collaborate on a royalty-sharing basis that made business sense, I would gladly explore that. I have nothing against human illustrators. I have something against making a financially irrational decision that guarantees a project will lose money from the outset.
There is a difference between rejecting artists and recognizing constraints.
That is why lines like “I avoid anything AI. I’m an artist” strike me less as a defense of craft than as a declaration of social positioning. It draws a line between the supposedly legitimate and the supposedly impure, between “real creators” and those deemed lesser for using tools someone else dislikes. Sometimes that line is philosophical. Sometimes it is aesthetic. Sometimes it is economic without admitting that it is economic.
Because, bluntly, refusal can be easier when you can afford refusal.
That does not make every critic of AI a snob. It does mean that opposition to AI can function as a luxury position for some creators whose finances, training, business model, or clientele give them options many independents simply do not have. Independent creators often live in the world of margins, affordability, experimentation, and practical compromise. They live in the world where a book still has to be priced low enough for an actual parent or grandparent to take a chance on it at a market table.
And that world has its own kind of honesty.
I am not trying to pass myself off as something I am not. I am not pretending to be a brush-and-ink illustrator. I am a writer with a technology background, using available tools to bring visual accompaniment to written work in a way that is economically possible.
That is the truth of it.
If someone else chooses different tools, that is their business. But I have little patience for the assumption that using modern tools somehow disqualifies a person from the larger act of making.
Creativity has always involved tools.
Pens are tools.
Brushes are tools.
Cameras are tools.
Word processors are tools.
Photoshop is a tool.
A lathe is a tool.
A CNC machine is a tool.
AI is a tool.
And for many working creators, AI is a tool of economic choice.
Not because they despise artists.
Not because they want to cheat the process.
Not because they are trying to cut human beings out of the picture.
But because they are trying to make the picture possible at all.
That seems to me a far more honest position than elitism dressed up as principle.