Shame Doesn’t Stop Artists From Using AI. It Stops Them From Telling You.

Prohibition didn’t stop Americans from drinking. It moved the drinking behind an unmarked door, gave it a password, and turned honest bartenders into criminals. The speakeasy was what shame and a ban built together: the same behavior, only hidden, and with everyone involved now lying about it.

The loudest corner of the art world is building one right now. Every artist who gets called a thief for touching an AI tool teaches ten more to keep their mouths shut. The tool use doesn’t stop. The honesty does.

And the people doing the shaming think they’re winning, because the room got quieter.

What happened when an illustrator admitted using AI for a headstone?

A well-known children’s book illustrator and art teacher posted an image on Facebook last week: a logging truck hauling one enormous trout. A friend had asked him for a picture for his late father’s headstone. The father drove logging trucks and loved fly fishing. The illustrator didn’t have time to paint it, so he spent ten minutes on a prompt, got the image in about three, and gave it to his friend.

Then he did something almost nobody does anymore. He said so, in public, with the image right there.

His point wasn’t that AI is good. He said that if he’d had his choice, the technology would never have been able to generate images at all. His point was about the people who scream at artists for using it. He said he personally knows at least six very successful artists who use AI in their process, and that they’ll lie to your face about it, because you’ve made it unsafe to tell the truth.

The replies proved him right.

He was called a hack. A sloperator. Someone told him to go away in words I won’t print. Someone else wrote that he couldn’t be bothered to honor a dead man’s life and had door-dashed a memorial. Another imagined dying and having some stranger engrave AI garbage on their grave. A longtime follower announced he’d unsubscribed from everything the man had ever made.

All of that over a favor for a grieving friend, from a man who told the truth about how he did it.

Watch: Your Favorite Artists Are Secretly Using AI, Soundkey

Does shaming artists stop them from using AI?

No. It never has, and it can’t.

The shamer sees the artists who admit it and never sees the ones who don’t. So every pile-on lands on the honest person, and the quiet ones learn the lesson in real time: say nothing, post the finished piece, and if anyone asks, deny it.

One commenter said he uses AI for lighting reference and composition, never for the finished art, and that he’d never attack anyone for any reason. Another said she used it to plan a painting’s layout, then painted eighty percent of the final piece herself in about five hours. A third built a free drawing tool with AI’s help for art teachers. These are working artists describing ordinary process. In most art groups, every one of them would now think twice before saying it.

Multiply that by every group, every forum and every comment section, and you get an art world where the tool is everywhere and the admission is nowhere. Nobody who cares about artists should call that a win. It’s a speakeasy with better lighting.

The shamers hate hearing this part. Some of them are in the speakeasy too. The illustrator said it outright: look to your left and your right, because some of the people shouting “witch” the loudest are using it themselves. Shame does that. It makes the guilty louder, because volume is the best cover there is.

Who gets hurt when artists hide their AI use?

Start with the clients. A client who wants to know how their art was made won’t find out if every artist has learned that admitting AI gets them flogged in public. Disclosure only works when people can survive giving it.

Then the students. Art teachers can’t show students where these tools help and where they fall apart if every demonstration earns them a mob. One art professor in the thread said his class rule is that AI is allowed if a student can make it work for them, with heavy caveats, and that he uses it as a test: if AI can produce something as good as the student’s idea, the idea probably needs more work. That’s a smart, useful way to teach.

It’s also exactly the kind of thing people stop saying out loud once the pitchforks come out.

Then there are the artists who never touch AI. When everyone’s suspected and nobody admits anything, the handmade work gets accused right along with the rest. In another group this week, an author said she’d written in her author’s note that a book wasn’t AI, and a reviewer called it AI anyway. Shame destroys the very trust that would protect the people it claims to defend.

Every one of those costs falls on someone the shamer says they’re protecting.

Wasn’t the headstone image disrespectful to the dead?

That was the cruelest line of attack in the thread, and it deserves a straight answer.

The family asked for the image. The son of the man being remembered looked at a logging truck carrying a giant trout and decided it captured his father. That’s the only opinion about that headstone that counts. A stranger on Facebook who never met the man doesn’t get a vote on how his son honors him.

Telling someone they didn’t love their dead father enough because of the tool used to make a picture is a rotten thing to do. There’s no cause noble enough to make it decent. People have put clip art, stock photos and mail-order engravings on headstones for generations, and nobody accused those families of failing their dead.

The commenters who went there weren’t defending art. They were using a grieving family as ammunition.

Is shaming AI users like unions shaming strikebreakers?

The best argument in the whole thread came from an artist who said he understood the hardliners. His case: plenty of people will want free art, the shaming makes them hesitate, and historically, shaming people who undercut a group’s wages has worked. He compared it to union workers shaming the people who cross a picket line.

That’s a serious argument, and it gets a serious answer.

A picket line has a job behind it. Somebody was going to be paid, and somebody else crossed the line to take the work for less. The headstone wasn’t that. The illustrator said he wouldn’t have taken the job even for money, because he didn’t have the time. No artist lost a commission. A friend got a picture he’d otherwise never have had.

And shame aimed at a hunch can’t tell the scab from the bystander. It hits the person who disclosed and misses the person who didn’t. A pressure tactic that only ever lands on the honest protects nobody’s wages, and it teaches everyone to hide. If artists want to protect their pay, the useful targets are contracts, licensing terms and clients who want polished work for nothing. (See a charter that demanded licensing and consent, then lost its biggest backer.) A guy who made a picture for a friend’s headstone isn’t on that list.

What does a better conversation about AI in art look like?

It starts with asking instead of accusing. “How did you make this?” is a question. “Sloperator” is a verdict from someone who didn’t wait for an answer.

Judge the work. If the trout looks stiff and the trailer has the wrong number of axles, say so. One commenter did exactly that, politely, and it was the most useful reply in the thread. A critique of the result helps everyone. A sermon about the tool helps nobody.

Make room for honesty. If you run a group, write a rule about disclosure and then protect the people who follow it. A member who says “I used AI for the background” should get a conversation, never a stoning. Otherwise your rule is a trap, and everyone will see it as one.

And keep the line where it belongs. Passing off someone else’s work as your own is wrong whether you use a brush, a camera or a prompt. Using a tool isn’t. I’ve written before about whether writing with AI is theft, and about the pile-ons that follow when people decide it is, like the one over restored family photos. The pattern doesn’t change. A crowd gets angry, picks the nearest honest target, and calls it principle.

For my part, I don’t care what tool made a picture. I care if it’s good and if the person who made it is honest about it. A world where artists can say “I used AI here and painted the rest myself” is better for every artist in it than a world where they all swear they never touched it.

Who benefits when artists keep their AI use secret?

Nobody you’d want to help.

The clients who want cheap art get it anyway, from someone who won’t tell them how it was made. The artists who refuse to use AI get suspected anyway, because honesty has been driven out of the room. The companies building these tools lose nothing at all from an artist being called a hack on Facebook. They aren’t even in the thread. The only winner is the shamer’s sense of being right, and that doesn’t pay anyone’s rent.

I’ve been writing about this in the AI Derangement Syndrome series: people treating strangers as enemies over a tool, and calling the cruelty a cause. Writing groups and art groups have always had a crowd like this. The target changes. The behavior doesn’t.

More on how writers and artists are handling AI is in the AI and Writing hub. If you want help using AI in your own work openly, in a way you can stand behind when someone asks, my AI services are built for that.

Shame built the speakeasy once already. Everybody still drank. They just stopped telling the truth about it, and the people who’d poured an honest drink in daylight were the ones who paid.

From the author

The Birth of the Augmented Human
The shaming leaves out what goes right when people use AI properly. The Birth of the Augmented Human is my book about that side of the story.

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