Hiscox brought a group of experts to a London gallery to discuss AI's potential impact on art, artists and the art market.
AI is changing how we live. It’s also changing how we make art. But is AI-generated art any good? Do collectors want to buy it, and will it become a major part of the art market?
These questions, raised in the inaugural Hiscox AI+Art Report, were discussed by a panel of art experts. Julie Freeman and Eric Drass are both artists working at the cutting edge of AI and digital art; Melanie Gerlis and Jo Lawson-Tancred are art market journalists while Robert Read is Hiscox’s Head of Art and Private Clients and a commentator on art matters.
Melanie began by asking them what role people play in making AI-generated art. The absence of a clear human hand in them was cited in Hiscox’s report as being a big reason why collectors haven’t yet bought AI-generated artworks. But is AI, Melanie asked, the 21st century version of conceptual art?
“Good conceptual art has some immediate insight [that] can be super powerful,” replied Julie. “I don't know if you can compare that to AI computational processes. I'm not sure whether it will [produce] something that is so impactful and meaningful.”
Eric said: “Most of the generative art in 2024 [was] being produced by diffusion models, which are trained on enormous data sets, usually scraped from the internet, possibly with or without consent. You've got a black box that you talk to, and it will try and produce an image that matches what you've said.” Eric explained
“It's exciting as an artist to have this kind of tool, but it also makes me feel very guilty…part of the problem with AI models is [they make you feel] like you're not doing very much work. Having been trained as a painter, it takes me a long time to paint a picture, but I can produce 100 million pictures in an hour on my computer. It's not the same thing.”
Ultimately, the best AI-generated art, like all human-led creativity, speaks to us. Julie said that although she uses data and computers to interpret nature, “there's always a human thread” to her work.
In an increasingly technological world, Eric said: “I think people are going to be craving human reality. And I think good AI artwork expresses something about the artist behind it, and you can still see it.”
Is all art now AI generated?
It’s arguable that all new art is already being partly generated by AI, by being shaped and influenced by the technology. In 2025, “most of the internet is not going to be created by humans,” Eric said. As a result, “it's almost impossible that someone doesn't use AI to think about a work or start preparing it in their mind,” argued Robert.
But if art’s role is to creatively interpret reality, there’s a problem if much of what is now online isn’t real. “So, if you want to use the internet as your source of culture for training your model…they're already being poisoned by their own outputs,” said Eric.
Julie added: “Because there's so much fake news, how does [an AI] crawler that's just hoovering up [data] differentiate between the real journalism and the fake journalism?” That’s a growing problem, with more recognised media outlets now putting their output behind paywalls, said Jo Tancred-Lawson.
Is AI-generated art any good?
The Hiscox AI+Art Report exposed a worry that AI-generated art could be passed off as being by humans. A large majority of both art collectors (82%) and enthusiasts (75%) want AI-generated art to be clearly labelled. “That’s going to be very hard,” said Robert, but: “how artists define their works will help establish a more credible market.”
Julie explained: “If you're playing with one of these big models…then it's hard to see where your input is.
”That means there’s “some exploitation of a genuinely creative tool by people who aren't necessarily artists originally, but [who] just want to make some cash.” Juli Freeman
And there is money to be made in AI-generated art, with several works having fetched seven-figure sums since 2021.
In November 2024, a painting called “A.I. God” by an AI robot fetched $1.1 million at auction. But the sale was dismissed as “a gimmick” by Jo. Ai-Da Robot “was built by scientists”, not artists and has been presented everywhere from the United Nations to the House of Lords. “I think she's taken a lot of attention away from far more interesting projects by artists”, said Jo.
Eric agreed: “People [who] are not familiar with the idea of generative art being proper art [think] ‘Oh, wow, robots painting – it's amazing.'" But for experienced AI artists, “it's quite boring”.
But, Julie explained, the media attention around AI-generated art is good “for artists that have been working for decades in this field. It's beginning to legitimise what we've been doing.”
Is AI-generated art worth investing in?
The digital art trade has yet to take off, the Hiscox report states. That’s partly because the boom and bust in non-fungible tokens (NFTs), digital trading cards that were hot property in the early 2020s only for their value to collapse, has cast a long shadow over the AI-generated art market, said Robert.
The Hiscox report revealed “a nervousness about collecting AI-generated artwork, a majority (60%) of collectors worry about the authenticity and originality of AI-generated work, while 45% worry that its value could plunge soon after they buy it.
And although art buyers and enthusiasts are concerned that artists are not being paid fairly for their work being used to train the AI models that generate the art, Robert doesn’t see NFTs as being the solution.
“I think [the NFT art market has] been so widely abused. For me, it was just crypto with, a lot of times, just a really poor image attached to it. And [while] there were genuine artists who wanted to use NFTs, it's been completely destroyed by it becoming a crypto speculation market,” Boby concluded
It’s good that the AI-generated art market has taken time to get going, Jo said. “As with all art, a stable market needs time to grow.”
AI-generated art sales, have increased, reaching a peak in 2023. But are people collecting it because they think it’s good, or because they think they can turn a profit, Melanie asked.
The same motivations drive buyers of AI-generated art as any other collectible, said Robert. “Some of them will be doing it for investment, or have an element of investment about it, and others will be doing it because they want to collect it, because they love it.”
And, as with all investments, there will be winners and losers. “But there's no way to rationally work out what's going to win and what's going to lose when you're buying art,” Robert added.
