11/09/2026
Sometimes, people ask me if I use AI. I say no.
Sometimes, people tell me it’s hard to decipher what is AI and what is done by me and my own hands. I tell them I have never and will never use AI in any part of my work.
Once, a customer purchased a family portrait, sent me the family photos to work from, then sent me an AI mock-up – ‘prompt: please recreate this photo in a linocut style’.
I am sure it was well-intentioned and meant as inspiration but I seriously got the ick and declined the order. Since then, I have thought a lot about why that AI mock-up made me react so strongly and whether I did the right thing.
I wondered if it was because I feel threatened by AI taking my work –I honestly don’t think so. My customers love that my work is 100% hand-drawn, hand-carved, hand-printed. I mean, that’s the point of a linocut isn’t it? The hours of carving and thinking and human emotion that goes into it.
Is it because AI did a better job than me? Again, I don’t think so. It looked like a linocut. It had a “linocut style”, but doesn’t every lino artist have a different style? Saying Holbein and Picasso are painters so they have the same style just doesn’t make sense; they are
both obviously completely different. My version would have looked entirely different to Luiza Holub | Printmaker & Illustrator ‘s version, or ‘s version, or Harriet Popham ‘s version.
The AI mock-up made me feel so upset (besides the absolute waste of water) because it took all of the creativity, all of the critical thinking, all of the choices away.
Ultimately, I am glad I did not take on the commission after seeing the AI picture. My heart was well and truly not in it and that is the worst way to go into a creative job.
I absolutely LOVE my work. I love the stories that customers entrust me with, I love the scribbly sketches and the literal cutting out and glueing of compositions, I love the slow carving process where so many decisions are made and problems are solved, the rolling of the ink and that peel of the first print.
Everyone is different: some people use AI to answer questions, some artists use AI in their work. I’ll just be over here, choosing the human-made, human-considered route
