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113 subjects · 45 pro-AI · 67 anti-AI
Showing 113 profiles · 45 pro-AI · 67 anti-AI · 1 nuanced
Animator & Artist
Oscar-nominated Disney animator and co-director of Brother Bear. He urges fellow artists to “embrace” AI as a creative tool while condemning the nonconsensual training of models on artists’ work as unacceptable.
Artist
The Polish-American painter dubbed Silicon Valley’s favorite artist trains Boston Dynamics robot dogs to paint autonomously — headlining the NGV Triennial with her robot-artist installation Heterobota — and calls herself a techno-optimist.
Humanoid Robot Artist
The world’s first ultra-realistic humanoid robot artist paints with camera eyes and AI algorithms, addressed the House of Lords in 2022, and saw its Alan Turing portrait fetch over $1 million at Sotheby’s in 2024.
Roboticist & Artist
MIT-trained roboticist-artist who became OpenAI’s first artist in residence in 2024, turning GPT and DALL-E outputs into physical sculpture and arguing that AI is simply the newest tool in art’s long co-evolution with technology.
British AI-art pioneer who photographed and hand-labeled 10,000 tulips to train her own GANs — making machine learning her core medium while modeling what an ethical, hand-built dataset looks like.
Photographer
The most famous portrait photographer alive shrugged off the AI panic at her French Academy of Fine Arts induction in 2024: “That doesn’t worry me at all” — just another tool to take the plunge and learn.
AI Creative Tool
Open-source desktop “IDE for artists” for AI image and video creation. Built on the premise that artists need control, not slot machines — it turns prompting into crafting with 3D compositing, character posing, and scene blocking, and gives the source code away.
Digital Artist
The digital artist behind the $69 million Everydays NFT — known offstage as Mike Winkelmann — enthusiastically wields AI tools and dismisses the “cultural theft” charge as ridiculous, arguing human creativity is also remix.
Photomedia Artist
German artist who won the 2023 Sony World Photography Awards with an AI-generated image, refused the prize to force a debate, and champions AI image-making as its own medium — “promptography.”
Architect, MIT Senseable City Lab director
The MIT urbanist and architect curated the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale under the theme “Intelligens: Natural. Artificial. Collective.” — placing AI at the heart of world architecture’s biggest event.
AI Collaborative Artist
Pseudonymous “AI collaborative artist” whose work has sold at Sotheby’s and Christie’s and entered LACMA’s permanent collection — the most prominent artist to build an entire career on working with AI.
The world’s richest artist handed his iconic Spin Paintings over to a generative algorithm: The Beautiful Paintings (2023) let collectors configure machine-made spins, selling 5,500+ works for $20.9 million in nine days.
Painter
Britain’s greatest living painter and lifelong technology adopter — Polaroids, fax machines, iPads — debuted his first AI-assisted artwork on Glastonbury’s Pyramid Stage in 2023, at age 85.
The Pictures Generation painting star built a custom AI trained exclusively on his own Pastoral canvases, then painted over its outputs by hand in his New Pastorals series — treating the model like “a kid in art school.”
Artist and Stage Designer
The world’s most celebrated stage designer — Beyoncé, U2, the Super Bowl, Olympic ceremonies — has kept AI in her practice since 2016, co-creating POEMPORTRAITS with Google and an AI-poetry pavilion at the Dubai Expo.
Legendary Disney animator behind Ariel, the Beast, Aladdin, and Tarzan, and director of the Oscar-winning Over the Moon. He sees a genuine “path for using AI” — but one that, in his words, “really requires artists to use it.”
Curator
The art world’s most influential curator declared 2024 the Serpentine’s “Year of AI,” runs a Creative AI Lab with King’s College London, and consistently urges artists to engage the technology rather than cede it.
Animator & Director
Creator of Neon Genesis Evangelion and co-director of Shin Godzilla. He calls AI “almost too convenient” yet argues the industry has “no choice but to accept it while exploring its possibilities” — a resigned, exploratory embrace.
Composer & AI Artist
Composer with a Stanford PhD who has spent a decade making music with machine learning — from her AI “baby” Spawn to the Holly+ voice twin — while building Spawning, the consent layer for AI training data.
American artist collected by MoMA and the Whitney who builds “live simulations” — self-playing virtual ecosystems and AI creatures like BOB (Bag of Beliefs) that treat machine cognition itself as an artistic medium.
Artist & Game Designer
His Midjourney piece “Théâtre D’opéra Spatial” won the 2022 Colorado State Fair’s digital-art prize — the shot that started the AI-art war. He has fought the US Copyright Office in federal court to get it protected ever since.
Designer, former Apple Chief Design Officer
The designer of the iMac, iPod, and iPhone bet his post-Apple career on AI: OpenAI acquired his hardware startup io for roughly $6.5 billion in 2025, with his firm LoveFrom leading design of a new family of AI devices.
Mangaka & Legislator
Love Hina creator and the first manga artist elected to Japan’s legislature; defends Japan’s permissive AI training laws against heavy-handed regulation while floating opt-outs and licensing to compensate illustrators.
Avant-Garde Artist & Musician
Avant-garde legend behind “O Superman” who trained an AI text generator on her late husband Lou Reed’s writings — and cheerfully admits she is “totally 100%, sadly addicted” to conversing with it.
Artist & Filmmaker
Pioneering feminist media artist who built an AI chatbot artwork, Agent Ruby, back in 1998 — decades before ChatGPT — and has spent sixty years making celebrated work about how humans and intelligent machines shape each other.
AI Artist
German pioneer of neural-network art whose Memories of Passersby I was the first AI artwork auctioned at Sotheby’s (2019), and who later built Botto, a decentralized autonomous AI artist.
Artist & Technologist
Artist-technologist who, with partner Holly Herndon, built the consent infrastructure of AI art — Spawning and Have I Been Trained? — while defending AI as a legitimate medium in shows at the Whitney and the Serpentine.
South Park Co-Creator
Co-creator of South Park and co-founder of the deepfake studio Deep Voodoo, which raised $20M to bring consent-based AI visual effects to Hollywood — “we stumbled upon this amazing technology.”
Four-time Oscar-winning creator of Wallace & Gromit and the guiding hand of Aardman’s clay animation. In 2025 he said the studio would “embrace the technology” of AI — but cautiously, never at the expense of its handmade values.
Fashion Designer
The legendary American designer behind the sleeping bag coat went back to school at MIT in her late 70s, then built a proprietary AI model trained on her 57-year archive — declaring “AI could be my Karl Lagerfeld.”
Art Collective
The Paris trio behind Edmond de Belamy, the GAN portrait that sold for $432,500 at Christie’s in 2018 — the first AI artwork auctioned by a major house — and now an AI-art research lab run with the Sorbonne.
Architect, principal of Zaha Hadid Architects
The principal of Zaha Hadid Architects revealed in 2023 that “most” ZHA projects use DALL-E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion for early design ideation — and claims authorship of the results without apology.
Graphic Designer, Pentagram partner
One of the most influential graphic designers alive, Scher unapologetically defended her Pentagram team’s use of Midjourney to generate 1,500 icons for the US government’s Performance.gov redesign amid fierce backlash in 2024.
Designer
France’s most famous designer created the A.I. chair for Kartell with Autodesk’s generative software — billed as the first production chair designed with artificial intelligence — and champions AI as a way to design more with less.
One of France’s most important contemporary artists has made machine intelligence central to his work — from neural networks reconstructing human thoughts at the Serpentine to Liminal in Venice, where AI edited films in real time.
Media Artist
The most institutionally celebrated AI artist alive: his machine-learning work Unsupervised drew millions at MoMA, his data paintings wrapped the Las Vegas Sphere, and his Dataland is the world’s first museum of AI arts.
Manga Writer
Pseudonymous Japanese manga writer behind Cyberpunk: Peach John (2023), billed as the world’s first fully AI-illustrated commercial manga — drawn with Midjourney in six weeks — and named a TIME100 AI Innovator.
Animator & Comedian
Creator of Family Guy and the Ted films. In 2026 he used AI to render himself as Bill Clinton for Ted’s second season, defending the technology as “a tool” that need not trample on other artists’ work.
Artist & Researcher
Chinese-Canadian artist who has spent a decade painting in duet with AI-driven robot arms called D.O.U.G. — work that put them on the TIME100 AI list and into the Victoria and Albert Museum’s collection.
American artist behind Conversations with Bina48 and community-trained AI storytelling projects; won the inaugural $100,000 LG Guggenheim Award in 2023 for two decades of equity-focused work with artificial intelligence.
Japan’s most famous contemporary artist embraces AI while admitting he fears it — using it to help reconstruct 17th-century Kyoto masterpieces and warning that “artists who create familiar things will be left behind.”
Co-creator of South Park and The Book of Mormon who co-founded the deepfake studio Deep Voodoo — he calls the technology “this new form of animation” and “a perfect medium for us.”
Pro-AI Debate Advocate
Pseudonymous Redditor behind u/Witty-Designer7316 — prolific pro-AI meme-maker, debater, and r/DefendingAIArt moderator whose “Pro-AI Debate Guide” became a reference point (and a target) in Reddit’s AI-art wars.
VFX Artist & Director at Corridor Digital
VFX artist, engineer, and host at Corridor Digital (@wrenthereaper) who fronts many of the channel’s AI-in-VFX experiments — he calls the democratization AI brings to filmmaking “incredible” and bets NeRF-style tech will become indistinguishable from real video.
Industrial Designer, founder of fuseproject
The Swiss-born star of humanitarian industrial design (One Laptop Per Child, Jawbone) designed ElliQ, the AI companion robot for isolated elders, and has published his own principles for making AI serve human good.
Artist & Author
Painter and author best known for Dinotopia, his best-selling illustrated world of humans and intelligent dinosaurs. A traditional plein-air craftsman who holds one of the most two-sided positions in the debate: genuinely inspired by what generative AI can do and willing to call the best of it “original,” yet unflinching about its harms — the threat to working concept artists, whole disrupted pipelines — and an early advocate that artists share in the proceeds when their name is used to prompt.
Oscar-winning Australian claymation auteur behind Harvie Krumpet, Mary and Max, and Memoir of a Snail — which he ended with a card reading “this film was made by human beings.” A champion of the handmade against the machine-made.
Artist & Activist
China’s most famous dissident artist has taken AI on directly — declaring that art a machine can replicate is “meaningless” and that AI, for all its data, lacks imagination and human will.
Animator & Show Creator
Creator, writer, and voice of Disney’s Gravity Falls, who reacted with viral scorn on learning his scripts had been scraped to train AI — joking about encoding a virus into a screenplay — and has repeatedly mocked the industry’s embrace of generative tools.
Manga Artist
South Korean–born manga artist behind Sun-Ken Rock and the hit series Dr. Stone, who stopped posting his art on X in protest after the platform added an AI image-editing tool, saying he cannot accept his work being exploited without consent.
Illustrator & Tech Reviewer
Cleveland illustrator and YouTube’s go-to drawing-tablet reviewer (900K+ subscribers), whose 2026 essay “My Thoughts On Generative AI” laid out a working artist’s case against AI trained on unlicensed art: “I own my art. If you want to make money off it, too, you need to pay me.”
Anti-AI Art Platform
The artist portfolio and social platform founded by photographer Zhang Jingna that bans AI-generated imagery outright. When Meta began training AI on Instagram posts in June 2024, Cara exploded from 40,000 to more than 650,000 users in a week.
Art YouTuber
British art YouTuber (nearly a million subscribers) whose supply-testing channel turned consumer watchdog: her videos exposing AI-generated coloring books and AI-promoted craft kits argue the slop wave is defrauding buyers and pushing real artists out.
Director & Animator
Co-creator of Lilo & Stitch and director of How to Train Your Dragon and The Wild Robot. Though his 2024 film is about a machine, he stresses no AI made it — calling the movie a work that “stands in defiance of AI.”
Oscar-winning director of Big Hero 6 and Netflix’s The Sea Beast. He calls himself “more of a Luddite,” openly nervous that generative AI will be used to put artists out of work.
Entertainment Artists’ Nonprofit
Nonprofit for the concept artists behind films and games that became visual artists’ vehicle in the AI fight — crowdfunding a Washington lobbyist in 2022 and co-sponsoring California’s AI training-data transparency legislation.
Manga artist known for Chrono Crusade and World Embryo, who deleted years of his artwork from X in 2025 after the platform added an AI image-editing feature, saying he had lost any desire to leave his work there.
Animator
Peabody Award-winning animator and creator of Disney Channel’s The Owl House who became one of animation’s most outspoken opponents of generative AI. In 2025 she urged fans to cancel Disney+ and pirate her own show in protest of the studio’s embrace of AI-generated content.
Illustrator & Filmmaker
Legendary Sandman cover artist who ran one of the deepest artist experiments with Midjourney — a whole book, Prompt — and came out the other side refusing to call the results art: “I actually felt physically sick doing it.”
Illustrator & Concept Artist
Illustrator and concept artist for Marvel, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and Magic: The Gathering who publicly quit Wizards of the Coast over AI art and became a blunt online voice against models he says are trained to imitate artists like him.
Animator & Game Artist
Acclaimed Irish animator behind Everything, Mountain, and the game sequences in Her, whose 2022 essay “The Infinite Art Scenario” argued generative AI is built on “indiscriminately harvested creative material, which nobody signed up for.”
Open-Source Illustrator
French illustrator behind the free-culture webcomic Pepper&Carrot who found thousands of his openly licensed artworks inside AI training datasets — “all without my consent” — and has documented in detail why he refuses generative AI.
Designer and host of Design Matters
The designer, author, and host of the long-running podcast Design Matters argues that AI can imitate a style but cannot make meaning, insisting that creative value lives in human experience the machine can never have.
Drawing Tutorial YouTuber
German drawing-tutorial YouTuber (2.1M subscribers) behind one of the biggest how-to-draw channels; argues that generative AI promises a future of “bland and boring” machine content and that posting AI art normalizes a corporate land-grab against artists.
Comedy Drawing Channel
Comedy drawing channel (1.9M subscribers) where professional artists turn “dumb ideas into even dumber drawings.” Once fond of neural-net prompts as joke fodder, the crew dropped the format as generative AI turned into an art-scraping industry they now mock and refuse to touch.
PizzaCake Comics Creator
The Canadian cartoonist behind PizzaCake, one of Reddit’s most-followed webcomics — a vocal AI critic who says machine-made content “misses that intentionality” and lands in the uncanny valley.
Fantasy Illustrator & AI-Regulation Advocate
Dutch fantasy illustrator (Evaboneva) who advises the European Guild for AI Regulation and whose painting Belladonna became the first artwork protected with the Nightshade data-poisoning tool.
Creator of Dexter’s Laboratory, Samurai Jack, and Primal. His response to generative AI is to out-human it: make animation so original, he says, that it becomes “AI-proof.”
Visual Media Company
The world’s best-known stock photo agency, which sued Stability AI in the US and UK over the scraping of more than 12 million images — while simultaneously launching its own fully licensed AI image generator.
Studio Ghibli Director
Studio Ghibli director and son of Hayao Miyazaki who argues that AI, lacking lived human experience, can automate an animator’s tasks but never replicate the emotional depth that defines Ghibli’s films.
Fantasy Illustrator
Polish fantasy illustrator for Dungeons & Dragons and Magic: The Gathering whose name became the most-used artist prompt in Stable Diffusion — used tens of thousands of times more than Picasso — entirely against his will.
Animator & Filmmaker
Co-founder of Studio Ghibli and director of Spirited Away, whose 2016 reaction to an AI animation demo — “an insult to life itself” — became the single most-quoted line in the entire AI-art debate.
Stop-motion director of The Nightmare Before Christmas and Coraline. He dismisses generative AI’s creative value and insists that animation still feel “touched by a real person.”
Creator of the long-running manga JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, who in 2024 called generative AI a “societal evil,” warned of an art world overrun by scammers, and recounted mistaking an AI forgery for his own work.
Media Artist & Theorist
One of the world’s most influential media artists and theorists, whose essay “Mean Images” and book Medium Hot dissect generative AI as an exploitative, “enshittifying” machinery of statistical images.
Illustrator & Character Designer
Los Angeles illustrator for Disney and Penguin Random House who became a landmark case in the AI-art fight when a Stable Diffusion model was fine-tuned on her work without consent in 2022 — she called it invasive and uncomfortable.
Animator & Educator
British animator and popular animation-tutorial YouTuber who joined the historic 2025 anti-generative-AI protest at the Annecy festival, calling the technology a “vehicle for exploitation” built by extracting artists’ life’s work.
Creative-Industry Coalition
Coalition of 200+ creative-industry organizations — unions, labels, publishers, and guilds from music to acting — launched at SXSW 2023 around seven principles for AI, chief among them: no copyright for machines, and no training without consent.
Graphic designer and author
The provocateur graphic designer behind decades of raw, hand-drawn posters made one of the design world’s bluntest cases against generative AI, arguing that the creative future belongs to those who refuse it, not those who master it.
Comics Artist & DC Comics President
Superstar comics artist and DC Comics president who told New York Comic Con that DC will not support AI-generated storytelling or artwork — “not now, not ever” — declaring that AI “doesn’t make art. It aggregates it.”
Director of The Book of Life and Netflix’s Maya and the Three. In 2026 he publicly quit Amazon’s generative-AI animation program after community backlash, dropping his planned “Punky Duck” series — “Actions speak louder than words.”
Horror Mangaka
World-famous horror manga master behind Uzumaki and Tomie who has said in interviews since 2023 that AI replacing manga artists is now among his biggest fears — “that kind of existence is frightening.”
Concept Artist
Concept artist behind the look of Marvel’s Doctor Strange, and the lead plaintiff in Andersen v. Stability AI — the landmark artists’ class action against image generators. The most prominent artist-organizer in the fight over AI training.
Architecture critic, creator of McMansion Hell
The architecture critic behind McMansion Hell dismantled the idea that AI would “disrupt” architecture, arguing its images are conservative, derivative, and — because AI has no body and no stake in place — the “death of everything that makes architecture interesting.”
Nashville watercolor artist who found their own name used thousands of times as an AI prompt — and became a co-plaintiff in Andersen v. Stability AI, the landmark artists’ class action.
Illustrator & YouTuber
Cartoonist Haley Newsome — LavenderTowne to her 2M+ YouTube subscribers — is one of art-YouTube’s most visible AI critics, poisoning her own drawings with Nightshade and answering an AI clone of her style with a hand-drawn tutorial.
Dutch digital artist known as Loish, whose luminous character art helped define the Instagram-era illustration aesthetic; she backed the December 2022 ArtStation “No AI” protest, calling dataset scraping “commercial use of my art without my consent.”
Independent Game Designer
Reclusive designer of the celebrated indie games Papers, Please and Return of the Obra Dinn, who says he now won’t even discuss his work in progress for fear it will be “slurped up by AI” or copied.
Art Educator & Former Blizzard Artist
Ex-Blizzard senior artist turned YouTube art educator (1.9M subscribers) and Cubebrush founder. Calls generative image models engines built on art “taken without permission” — and now poisons his own drawings with Nightshade before posting them, hoping to “do maximum damage.”
Architect, historian, and author
The American architect and historian issued one of the profession’s bluntest anti-AI manifestos, vowing to “take to the barricades” against generative design and arguing that experienced human designers cannot be matched by an algorithm.
Photographer & Writer
The photographer who entered a real flamingo photo in the AI category of the 1839 Awards — won both the jury and people’s vote prizes, then was disqualified — as a deliberate protest for human-made art.
Artist & Writer
Artist, writer, and chronicler of protest movements who organized a 2023 open letter — signed by thousands of artists and journalists — urging publishers to restrict “vampirical” AI-generated illustration.
Architect, founder of Foster + Partners
One of the world’s most influential high-tech architects says the profession does not need AI — that the technology “has the ability to deceive, to invent,” and that the physical reality of buildings and streets cannot be replicated by a machine.
Filmmaker & 3D Animator
Montreal-based filmmaker and 3D animator who founded “This Film Was Made Without AI,” a collaborative project inviting artists to animate human-made disclaimers, after his own hand-crafted film was falsely accused of being AI-generated.
Animation Director
Oscar-winning co-director of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse who rose through the industry as a storyboard artist, and who has publicly ridiculed studios turning to generative AI to replace the boarding jobs that gave him and countless others their start.
Pseudonymous Hong Kong illustrator and VTuber whose art-education YouTube channel — nearly a million subscribers — doubles as one of the most-watched artist critiques of generative AI, which she calls theft on a massive scale.
Hollywood concept artist (The Matrix Resurrections, The Hunger Games) turned prominent anti-AI campaigner, whose side-by-side tests exposed how image models regurgitate copyrighted film frames — evidence later cited in Disney and Universal’s lawsuit against Midjourney.
Concept artist behind the realistic Pokémon of Detective Pikachu whose August 2022 warning that image generators were “actively anti-artist” and “want our jobs” became a rallying cry for the artist backlash.
President, Warner Bros. Animation
President of Warner Bros. Animation and Cartoon Network Studios — a studio executive who, unusually for his level, has said he has seen nothing AI can do visually that a human artist does not do better, and framed protecting artists as a studio duty.
Storyboard Artist & Director
Storyboard artist and director who serves on the Animation Guild’s AI task force and negotiating committee, and who has become a plainspoken explainer of how image generators are powered by artists’ scraped portfolios.
Artist & YouTuber
Toronto illustrator behind the SamDoesArts YouTube channel (3M+ subscribers) who became a prime target of AI style cloning in late 2022 — and answered with widely viewed videos calling nonconsensual training “an industrial scale violation” of artists’ rights.
Cartoonist
Creator of the beloved webcomic Sarah’s Scribbles, and lead plaintiff in Andersen v. Stability AI — the landmark class action accusing AI image generators of mass copyright infringement.
Anime Director
Director of Cowboy Bebop and Samurai Champloo who calls generative AI “a heartless monster” and argues it is “better not to use AI in the creative field.”
Swedish artist behind Tales from the Loop and The Electric State who, after an AI was used to mimic his haunting retro-futurist style in 2022, dismissed generative imagery as “derivative, generated goo” served up by “our new tech lords.”
Concept Artist & Illustrator
Concept artist and drawing educator whose 2022 video essay “The End of Art: An Argument Against Image AIs” became a manifesto for the artist resistance to generative AI.
Animation Workers’ Union
IATSE Local 839, the union of more than 5,000 Hollywood animation workers. It made generative AI the centerpiece of its 2024 contract fight, staging the largest animation labor rally in history — and ratified a deal many members felt fell short.
Designer, founder of Heatherwick Studio
The British designer behind the Vessel and Google’s London HQ argues that AI can only regurgitate existing forms — that it will build “very boring buildings” because, unlike a human designer, it cannot suffer, love, or hold a point of view.
Three-time Oscar-nominated Irish director and Cartoon Saloon co-founder behind The Secret of Kells, Song of the Sea, and Wolfwalkers. He describes his studio’s hand-drawn path as a deliberate “response to AI.”
Animator & Story Artist
Professional animator and story artist — credits include How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World, The Croods: A New Age, Blue Eye Samurai, and Invincible — who teaches hand-drawn animation to 380K+ YouTube subscribers and argues generative AI defeats the artistic growth that gives art its meaning.
MacArthur-winning artist of surveillance and machine vision whose ImageNet Roulette project with Kate Crawford exposed racist labels inside AI training data — and pushed ImageNet to purge 600,000 images.
Illustrative designer
A veteran “illustrative designer” and educator, Glitschka publicly ridiculed Adobe’s generative vector feature as “Text to Clip-Art” and warned that prompt-based shortcuts rob young designers of the foundational craft they need.
Creator of Gundam
Creator of the Mobile Suit Gundam franchise who argues AI will never overpower anime because humans instinctively “can tell when something is not real” and will return to analog line drawing.
Award-winning fashion and fine-art photographer who founded Cara, the anti-AI art platform that exploded from 40,000 to 650,000 users in a week — and a serial courtroom victor over image theft.
