From club posters to character cartoons to educational diagrams, AI-generated visual and literary art is becoming more common on the Santa Clara University campus. Teachers, students and faculty are utilizing this new tool for their work. But while AI can provide a degree of fun and ease to creating artwork, any benefit is outweighed by the potential to endanger us and threaten our human creativity.
Generative AI does not only impact artists and consumers. With the proliferation of deepfakes—realistic digital forgeries that mimic a person’s appearance and voice—identity theft and harassment are increasingly becoming an issue. Nadia Naffi, an associate professor in educational technology at Université Laval, wrote in an article for the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization saying that “in a world of advanced synthetic media, AI literacy isn’t just about using AI tools—it’s about surviving in an AI-mediated reality where seeing and hearing are no longer believing.”
An AI image editing tool called Imagine Image was released in 2025 on X, formally known as Twitter. This feature originally allowed users to edit any images posted on X, with the edited version showing up under the original post. Grok, X’s signature AI chatbot, was given access to this feature without sufficient guardrails, leading to the generation of more than three million sexualized images in just 11 days. Over 23,000 of these images included children. The victims were depicted in binkinis, lingerie or full nudity publically on X.
At Santa Clara University, this issue has manifested on the anonymous social media platform Fizz, where users have prompted realistic footage of people on campus, potentially harming their reputation. Anyone with a computer has access to free image and video generation tools, which in turn enables them to bully their peers online.
Meanwhile, the process of creating these images hurts human artists. While some real images and pieces of art are gathered ethically, many are not. Many works from photographers, painters, writers and more have been stolen and fed to the generators without the artist’s knowledge or consent. Lawsuits have been filed against the AI companies profiting from this theft.
Furthermore, through the generation of AI art, the original artist’s creativity is lost. Unlike a human who carries intent with each stroke of the brush or etch of the pen, AI-generated art is created by refining random inputs. Any originality from the piece happens by chance and without purpose. Ilan Ben-Meir, a researcher for Brown University, argues that art is made to move us, provide new perspectives and give the viewer emotions; it is not made simply for entertainment. While AI can create pretty pictures, it lacks the depth that comes from a human perspective.
The time to fight back is now, because any use of AI image generation improves a model’s abilities. The AI image generators are generative adversarial networks, or GANs, and consist of two deep neural networks, or methods used by AI to teach it how to process data in a similar way to the human brain. With more data input, these networks refine themselves and are able to create more realistic images, predictably leading to more harm.
The alternatives to using AI art haven’t changed from before the technology was widely accessible. Instead of typing up a prompt, Santa Clara University students and faculty can seek out help from online databases, graphic design websites and each other. Many students—art majors or not—would love the chance to add a graphic design commission to their resume. Supporting real artists is the first step to fighting back.