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The hashtag has become a form of silent protest—and a rallying cry from concept artists and illustrators around the world.

Fueled by the AI frenzy, #artbyhumans is the new #nofilter

BY Elissaveta M. Brandon5 minute read

Not so long ago, seemingly every post on our Instagram feed came with a proud #nofilter disclaimer. In an act of rebellion against the abundance of enhanced photos—and the veneer of perfection perpetuated by social media—influencers posted unedited sunsets and celebrities posed for make-up-free selfies.

Today, the abundance of AI-generated images has kicked the conversation into another gear. The question is no longer whether someone boosted the brightness or adjusted the contrast on their photos. It’s whether someone took that photo—or made this artwork—in the first place. The meteoric rise of generative AI systems like Dall-E or Midjourney has ignited another kind of rebellion in the creative community. And what better way to communicate this rebellion than with another hashtag?

#Artbyhumans hasn’t yet risen to the gargantuan proportions of #nofilter. Counting about 4,500 Instagram posts at the time of writing, it’s not even close to the more than 280 million posts that are tagged with #nofilter today. But it encapsulates the zeitgeist as perfectly as #nofilter did back when it first started. It’s also part of a large ecosystem of similar hashtags like #notoaigeneratedimages, #humanart and #noAI.

For those who use #artbyhumans, the hashtag has become a form of silent protest and a rallying cry from concept artists and illustrators who feel affected, and in some cases threatened, by the crushing popularity of AI. An Amsterdam-based freelance concept artist who asked to be referenced by his artist name, Diepfris, started using the hashtag in September. At first, he would tag some of his posts with the hashtag #noAI but he didn’t like the negative messaging it conveyed; #artbyhumans was “way more elegant,” he says.

Diepfris spent more than 10 years as an industrial designer before transitioning to making art for games. His Instagram is filled with meticulously hand-sketched sci-fi vehicles and machines that look like they could feature in a mashup of Blade Runner and Star Wars. A year ago, few people discovering his work would’ve questioned if these were drawn by a human. Today, you couldn’t blame someone from being fooled into thinking they were drawn by an AI instead. Not because Diepfries’s work looks subpar, but because AI-generated images look so up to par.

“The rate at which the output quality of AI image generators is increasing is amazing and alarming,” says Diepfris. Like many others in his field, he worries that AI will one day be able to respond to complex briefs and render the work of a concept artist like himself obsolete. “An art director could just use the brief he or she usually prepares and feed that to the AI,” he says. “In that scenario the concept artist’s services would essentially be redundant. Concept art as a job would die out and a lot of people would find themselves out of work.”

Not everyone shares this point of view. According to Grant Regan, a concept artist and illustrator based in Melbourne, Australia, AI can’t possibly process a complex brief the way a human can, and no amount of search terms can make up for a human’s keen ability to distill technical concepts. When Regan works with clients, he says he has to strike a balance between stakeholders with contradictory opinions, resulting in a back and forth that requires mediation skills, empathy, and heaps of patience. “Attempting this kind of response to client direction and feedback through an application like Midjourney or Stable Diffusion wouldn’t be feasible,” he says. “Monkeys, typewriters, and Shakespeare springs to mind.”

Regan’s biggest concern isn’t the threat that AI could pose to his career, but the conniving nature of an algorithm that uses a “scatter-gun” approach to scrape other artists’s work and create a collage of their art without their permission. “It has a superficially appealing sameness to it, and as completed production art it would frequently fall short,” he says. So he uses the hashtag #artbyhumans to celebrate both the skill and intentionality of his work. And also to communicate to potential clients that if they hire him, they would get “someone who has the requisite artistic and design chops to provide a response to a brief that address its requirements.”

For many artists, the hashtag reflects a desire to set themselves apart from the onslaught of AI-generated images crawling around social media. But in a way, it suggests a certain level of surrender, too—a whispered acknowledgement that AI has become so good that without the disclaimer that something was drawn by a human, viewers may believe it was not. In a world where machines can produce such convincing work, how can humans stand out?

Jim Rowden, a digital artist based in Fox Island, Washington, thinks about this a lot. He started using #artbyhumans after noticing it on a fellow artist’s page, and it immediately resonated with him. The fellow artist in question is the Scottish concept artist Ian McQue, who doesn’t recall where he first saw the hashtag, but noted in an email that he adopted it a while back as a “silly response to the preponderance of AI imagery starting to seep into social media.”

Rowden mentioned he was worried and angry, but also jealous of AI. “I went to four years of art school a long time ago and, for various reasons, basically stopped working towards a career in Illustration,” he says. “Now, years later, when I have the opportunity to refocus on creative projects, finally getting excited about my work, machines can now do what I’m working towards with very little effort, and people are celebrating this.”

He says his work is digital, which in his view makes it all the more difficult to convey the human touch required to make it. In this flurry of AI-generated images, he feels compelled to compete. “How can I provide something a machine cannot?” he asks. “Creating art that tells a story with feeling and emotion is something I have struggled with in the past. Now I feel I have to quadruple my efforts.”

Ultimately, and like others, Rowden finds comfort in the fact that there will always be an audience for “art by humans,” as the hashtag goes. Tagging his work is only his humble way of saying “Hey! Look! I’m over here! I am so thankful for you.”

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Elissaveta is a design writer based in Brooklyn. Her writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Wired, CityLab, Conde Nast Traveler, and many others More