The recent case involving Uniqlo Malaysia’s UT Me campaign with Oriental Kopi sparked a firestorm in our local creative circles.
The collaboration was called out for featuring AI-generated art on their shirts, leading to public shaming of the brands for choosing an algorithm over a human illustrator especially given Oriental Kopi’s size.
As a studio owner who has been in the illustration industry for a decade, I understand the frustration. Most people vocalizing their anger that brands should engage real artists are, naturally, from the creative industry.
But here’s the tough truth: for the majority audience, no one cares.
They don’t even know it’s AI, and with AI art getting more seamless every day, it’s becoming incredibly difficult to spot for the untrained eye.
This forces us to ask a difficult question: Why aren’t brands engaging illustrators for these projects?
In my experience, the decision is rarely singular. It’s a confluence of factors:
- Time: Sometimes, these high-profile collaborations materialize at the last minute. The required turnaround time, less than three weeks is simply not enough for artist selection, budget approval, production, and delivery. The timeline alone often pushes brands toward instantaneous solutions.
- Aesthetic: Brand stakeholders might not know which artist suits a campaign. In the case of Oriental Kopi, the style was very generic and lacked a personal identity. Brand owners either haven’t been exposed enough to enjoy illustration styles outside of the generic AI aesthetic or they are simple seeking that neutral, “generic style” because the artists they encounter often have too strong a personal flair.
- Money: While I don’t believe Oriental Kopi was trying to penny-pinch, many clients face relentless demands for monthly or weekly campaigns. They lack the budget or the resources to plan two months ahead for a unique illustration that only lasts thirty days. For them, stock images were the best choice yesterday; AI art is the best choice today.
When we rage about brands not using human artists, we often frame it as the brand underappreciating our work. But, deep down, we rage out of fear, the fear of losing our livelihood.
However, the immediate “victims” aren’t us; they are the artists who made their living from stock images. Their work was fed to the training models, and clients are now opting for instant AI generation instead of purchasing a subscription to their libraries.
We will only be out of a job if we continue to produce the “generic artwork”, the kind of work that can be generated from trained art.
My prediction is that AI art will eventually hit a plateau. It can only rearrange what has already been created. It is us, the human artists who will continue to come up with fresh ideas, pairing them with our singular personal flair.
Brand owners will never want a limited-edition collaboration and proudly announce it was created by an AI. They will always prefer to leverage the human artist and their creation story because that is where the soul and value lie.
We are in a new era, and AI is simply a tool meant to change the way we make art. Artists shouldn’t spend time “rendering” photorealistic art; we should spend more time exploring the subject we want to convey, using AI to handle the rendering or to test different layouts instantly, keeping our creative momentum on pace.
My ultimate dream is to have an easy-to-use personal neural network that is trained only on our own unpublished work, it will be a private tool we use to try out ideas and possibilities, not a public library we compete with.
Art is not just about the skill; it is the thinking.
AI art is soulless, and it is our job to make art that carries our soul. In this era, we must stop creating repetitive, generic-looking artwork, as those pieces will be replaced by AI in a split second.
When the printing press was invented, the artists who painted flyers for a living raged; they were put out of work. But in the long run, printing was a technology that empowered artists. Artists stopped having value by copying flyers by hand; they gained their place in the industry by being the creator of the artwork itself.
We stand at a similar precipice today. Our value isn’t in the execution of the generic, but in the ingenuity of the concept.
– Lai
