Takashi Murakami
Artist
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.”
Why this score
How the formula works →- +2.8proUses AI in their work
- +2.8proHas published AI-made work
- +1.3pro3 pro-AI statements (forceful)
- ±0nuancedHolds a documented two-sided view
Weights, statement counts, the ×1.25 multiplier for having a stake in an AI-impacted field, and the formula’s smoothing are already baked in — the points add up to the score (direction-free evidence pulls toward the middle instead): Strongly Pro-AI · 6.9/10
In his words
The old-school designers hated (digital drawings), saying it wasn’t real design or wasn’t creative because it was computerized. But who has that opinion now? Maybe in another 10 or 20 years, no one will have an issue with AI.
AI will certainly do damage to technical trades but I don’t think it will be able to block our ideas. The wackiest ideas, those that even AI cannot generate, will become even more valuable.
The generational change will be dramatic. Artists who create familiar things will be left behind.
I myself work with a certain kind of fear of one day being replaced.
Biography
Takashi Murakami (born 1962 in Tokyo) is Japan’s most famous contemporary artist — inventor of the “Superflat” theory that fused nihonga painting tradition with anime and consumer culture, collaborator of Louis Vuitton and Kanye West, and head of the Kaikai Kiki studio-factory that employs teams of assistants in the Warhol mold.
Love and fear
Murakami laid out his position to AFP in June 2023: the coming generational change would be “dramatic,” punishing artists who make familiar things and rewarding those whose ideas outrun the machine — even as he admitted working under the fear of being replaced. He likened the moment to the arrival of the Apple II, which swept away designers who refused it and empowered those who embraced it.
He practices what he preaches. For his 2024 Kyoto retrospective and the Gagosian London show Japanese Art History à la Takashi Murakami, his studio used AI to convert a high-resolution museum photograph of Iwasa Matabei’s 17th-century Rakuchū-Rakugai-zu screens into line drawings as the basis for monumental reinterpretations — though the tool’s limits meant 30 additional staff redrew everything by hand. He has also ventured through NFTs (his Murakami.Flowers project) and speaks of AI as one more turn in art’s technological wheel — telling CNN in 2024 that the artists who once dismissed digital drawing as “not real design” have been forgotten by history, and predicting the same fate for today’s objections to AI.
Quote sources
- AFP / France 24, 2023(france24.com)
- CNN, 2024(cnn.com)
Sources & further reading
Canonical record: https://battlelines.ai/topic/takashi-murakami
