After the Hype: Why AI Art Will Fade to a Commercial Niche
The above image was generated by ChatGPT 5. Steal it. There’s no copyright:)
I’ll get this off my chest first. I’m bored with Midjourney and one hundred percent AI-generated art. I have been dipping in and out of this space for years. Usually, I subscribe to Midjourney for a few months at a time before canceling out of sheer disinterest. Honestly, thirty bucks a month for unlimited use adds up fast, especially if I am barely touching it. That raises a bigger question. What does getting the most out of a subscription like that even look like? Nobody seems to be asking it, but they should.
Here is my take. Companies like Midjourney are headed for extinction faster than they think. It’s not lawsuits that will take them out. The legal battles over copyright matter, but there is a much bigger asteroid coming. Burnout.
I don’t think AI art is going to vanish completely, but I believe the one-hundred percent generative side will shrink hard and move out of personal use and into the commercial realm. Advertising agencies and marketing departments will keep using it and exploit it even more, but the average hobbyist will move on. This whole thing feels like the HDR photography craze a decade ago. That was when everyone and their grandmother were cranking out eye-searing, over-processed images with absurd exposure values. It was a novelty. Novelties fade.
I am not pretending I am some universal trend forecaster. Usually, I am just the guy with the unpopular opinion. I have a hunch that many people will bail on the AI art space and go back to whatever they were doing before. In my case, that is street and fine art photography.
I also do not think the so-called AI revolution will be the apocalypse people make it out to be. Yes, we will all have to adapt, and some will have a rougher ride than others. This is only my prediction, nothing more. It is based on the simple truth that trends come and go. The bigger the trend, the faster and harder the crash.
To the contrary, I believe we could be on the edge of a new renaissance, one where artists rediscover authenticity and audiences fall back in love with the handmade. The verdict is still out.
Maybe it’s too soon to start donning rose-colored shades. Here are my thoughts on why that future might not be so far off.
Artists, You’re Already Winning: Only You Can Copyright
I’ve touched on this before in prior articles. In the United States, you cannot copyright one hundred percent AI-generated art, or simply machine art. If the image was spit out by a machine and you did not make substantial alterations that clearly show human authorship, then it is not protected. The Copyright Office has already made this clear. If it is not protected, that means anybody can legally copy it, remix it, sell it, or put it on a T-shirt. That also means you can, too. Right? I mean, has anyone actually thought this whole thing through clearly? There are people out there (like me) who pay to use Midjourney on a subscription basis, and the work is not protected by copyright. It’s considered machine-generated, with no human author. It’s like a public domain image or public domain work, and although not technically accurate, such work is considered unprotected. It’s essentially there for the taking. This is the only reason why Shakespeare has been rewritten one billion times and will continue to be recycled to create new work. His work has been in the public domain, at least in hindsight, for over four hundred years.
Fight Back
Stop adding to the endless pool of hopeless tears. If you think Midjourney stole your work, stop crying about it and steal it back. If some AI company or some user ripped your art and is cashing in, flip the tables. Take the same output and run with it. Put it on a coffee mug. Print it on a shower curtain. Build a whole absurd line of products through print-on-demand. Blast it all over Instagram. Flaunt it. Let them know you took it back, because there was never any copyright on it in the first place. To really twist the knife, send them a thank-you Story for “sharing” your work.
This is where protest becomes power. Imagine a network of artists and online agitators grabbing Midjourney images and flaunting them across social media. Make the case loud and clear: AI-generated work isn’t copyrightable. It does not belong to you, it does not belong to me. It belongs to the machine, and because of that, I am free to use it, share it, alter it, even sell it. Until the laws change and the discourse shifts on a larger scale, there is only one way to protect yourself.
Play It Smart
There’s a more practical way to protect yourself short of participating in a coordinated protest. If you really want to play this game with teeth, start registering your hybrid or photographic work with the US Copyright Office. That way, if someone steals what actually belongs to you, you can sue them, and not just for damages but for court costs as well. That is the difference between whining online and actually having the power to drag someone into a courtroom.
The irony here is rich. People are paying thirty bucks a month for a Midjourney subscription to generate images that they cannot protect. Artists complain that someone stole their output while failing to realize that the alleged thief never owned it in the first place. Style is not copyrightable. You can copyright a painting, a photo, a drawing, or a story, but you cannot copyright the look, the vibe, or the style. That is why AI companies defend themselves by saying they are not stealing work, they are training on style.
Now, yes, scraping entire websites and books may still be illegal. That is why lawsuits are piling up against companies like OpenAI, Midjourney, and Anthropic. The New York Times sued over news scraping. Authors are suing because pirated books were used as training data. Disney and Universal are suing Midjourney because people can generate Spider-Man and Elsa with prompts. These fights are about copyrighted works being ingested without permission, not about copying a style. That distinction matters because style theft does not exist in the eyes of copyright law.
Don’t Use Snake Oil to Protect Your Work
Stop wasting money on gimmick tech like Nightshade, Glaze, DiffusionShield, and all the other products that promise to protect your work by hiding code inside your images so AI will not scrape them. It’s snake oil. They’re dogshit.
Nightshade says it can poison your image so a scraper-trained AI model will misread it later. Glaze says it hides your style with tiny pixel shifts so the AI spits out garbage instead of copying you. DiffusionShield and watermarking tools claim they can embed invisible signatures so you can track your work. Sounds clever, but all of it is fragile.
If your work has already been scraped, it is too late. And when a new super-scraper AI comes along, these tricks either stop working or only work until the next update. Think about antivirus software. Was there ever a final version? No. It is endless updates and subscriptions. What makes anyone think these temporary bandages will hold up against the next wave of scrapers?
Even now, the easiest workaround to negate these technologies is a screenshot. A ten-year-old can take one, and that screenshot erases every bit of hidden code. Once that screenshot makes it online, the scrapers will grab it anyway. No fancy poison pill or watermark can stop that.
None of these tools give you legal protection. They only give you a false sense of security while draining your wallet. What does give you protection is registering your work with the United States Copyright Office. For fifty five bucks you can register a collection of up to seven hundred and fifty images. That registration gives you the right to sue, to claim damages, and to recover court costs if you are in the right. That is the kind of protection worth paying for.
Forget the scam tech. Steal it back, laugh about it, print it on coffee mugs, and then focus your time and money on creating work you can register and defend. That is the only real shield you have.
To Win a Real Fight, You’ll Need a Lawyer
Most artists aren’t angry at random Midjourney users. The real anger is aimed at companies that scrape the internet, train their models on copyrighted work, and then churn out results that look uncomfortably close to an artist’s style or imagery. That is why the focus should be on holding companies accountable rather than chasing individuals experimenting with prompts.
Here is the warning. If you are going to accuse a company or another artist of infringement, you need to be absolutely certain the image you are looking at is purely machine-generated and not substantially reshaped by human work. If a person or a company takes a raw AI output and then layers in creative input such as painting over it, mixing it with original photography, or adding distinctive touches that clearly show human authorship, that version may qualify for copyright protection. In that case, the accused version may be protected and you could end up in the wrong.
This is why research matters. You need to study how much human work has gone into the version you are targeting. If the stakes are high, you should consult a lawyer before you act. The United States Copyright Office has already drawn the line. Purely machine-made images are not copyrightable. Once human creativity is added in a substantial way, copyright can apply.
A clear example is the Zarya of the Dawn case. The creator used Midjourney to generate comic panels. The Copyright Office ruled that the raw AI-generated panels were not protected. However, the way the artist arranged the panels, wrote the dialogue, and structured the story was protected. The machine parts were public domain, but the human-authored work received protection.
If you are dealing with untouched output from platforms such as Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, or DALL·E, then the material is effectively public domain. You can use it, modify it, and even sell it without fear of infringing. But if a company or another artist has transformed that output into something new, you need to tread carefully. The line between machine work and human authorship is where copyright begins to matter. If the issue is serious, you’ll need to lawyer up.
From Hobby to Corporate Tool
AI art is leaving the personal space of hobbyists and artists and moving directly into the hands of corporations. The signs are everywhere. What once felt like a toy for individual creators is now clearly becoming a tool for advertising departments, marketing teams, and e-commerce giants. The hobbyist era of Midjourney and the like is burning itself out, and the commercial takeover is already well underway.
Think back to the HDR craze. Everybody was making those sickly, oversaturated images that looked more like cartoon postcards than photographs. It was fun for a while, then the entire look collapsed under its own weight. People grew tired of it, and the only places it stuck around were in specific niches like real estate photography, where it is still used to punch up interiors. That is the model for AI art as well. The hobbyists and casual creators will get bored, but the business world will keep squeezing it for every ounce of efficiency.
Evidence of Burnout
One clear sign of burnout is what happened to DeviantArt. For decades it was a vibrant community filled with queer artists, fan creators, illustrators, and digital painters. Then generative AI flooded the platform. Suddenly, feeds that used to be filled with imaginative human work were clogged with endless machine churn. It became harder and harder for original artists to be seen or to sell commissions. A lot of people simply left. The platform lost influence and the spirit that made it a cultural hub withered. That is what happens when automation overwhelms creativity. Hobbyists abandon ship.
Another signal came from the marketplace side. A Stanford study looked at the arrival of generative AI in online art sales. Once these models appeared, the number of images for sale exploded. But the percentage of human made work collapsed. The balance tipped hard. Consumers were flooded with quantity, and human artists found themselves buried. Novelty wore off quickly for buyers as well, who started treating AI images like disposable stock photos. The market effect is exactly what I am talking about. Too much of the same thing. Boring.
And of course, there is the personal story that mirrors these trends. My own boredom. I was fascinated at first. Then I drifted away. I subscribed, unsubscribed, and circled back again, but every time I reached the same point. I lost interest. That pattern is not unique. I believe thousands of creators will follow the same arc. The first burst of fun is addictive, but without authorship or risk or ownership, there is nothing to keep you hooked. Burnout wins.
The Commercial Takeover
While individual users bail, corporations are ramping up. This is not theory. The numbers are already out there. McKinsey found that over seventy percent of organizations are now using generative AI, and most of that use is concentrated in marketing and sales. That is not artists messing around with Midjourney prompts. That is big companies weaving AI into their content pipelines to push out images faster and cheaper than humans ever could.
Digital Silk found the same thing. About sixty percent of U.S. companies are already using AI to keep their content streams filled and their social feeds alive. And nearly eighty percent of business leaders admit that adopting AI is critical to staying competitive. This is not a fad for them. It is an arms race.
Look at Unilever. They are producing thousands of AI generated marketing visuals every single week. Entire product launches are supported by AI driven influencer campaigns and content studios. The scale is massive. This is not a hobby. This is Fortune 500 strategy.
Or take Zalando, the European fashion retailer. They reported that seventy percent of their editorial images now come from generative AI. Campaign production time dropped from weeks to days. Costs were cut by ninety percent. You think they are going back to hiring photographers and art directors at the same scale? Not a chance. Once the cost savings are baked in, the jobs are not coming back. That is how corporations operate.
This is the real shift. The hobbyist fun is drying up, but in the corporate sector AI art is becoming a permanent fixture.
It’s Time to Rethink the AI Art Hype
For those who cannot stand AI art, time is on your side. Fads fade. HDR came and went, tilt-shift came and went, and the “Midjourney look” will go too. It might not feel like it right now, but the novelty is already burning itself out. As subscriptions dry up and user bases decline, the output from noncommercial users will slow to a trickle. Something new will show up to grab people’s attention and their dollars.
That does not mean the technology disappears. Generative AI is here to stay, especially for companies. For the prompt obsessives who love crafting long, elaborate instructions and seeing what comes out, there will always be tools. And there will be more of them, not fewer. In five years we will see dozens of platforms competing with Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, Firefly, and Leonardo. That competition will create new looks and styles, and the Midjourney aesthetic will fade into the background. As AI integrates into smartphones, the cycle of trends will spin even faster.
I should also admit that protest has its place, but most of what I see is lazy. If you hate Midjourney, where are the creative campaigns? Where are the mass copyright filings from artists who fear AI? Where are the viral hashtags, the image flips, the demonstrations that actually sting? Midjourney and its peers are already tied up in multiple lawsuits, and yet they keep raking in subscription fees. If you want to hit a company, you go after the bottom line. And nothing says fuck you like stealing their unprotected user outputs and flaunting them with a message that reads: you are paying thirty bucks a month and you do not even own your shit.
Do not mistake me for someone who hates AI art. I wrote In Defense of AI Art because this is not a black and white issue. My position has always been the same. AI is not stealing art. People are stealing art. Companies are stealing art. The tools change, but the theft is still human greed, not machine malice. Until an AI becomes sentient, it cannot “steal” anything. Only people can.
Artists should explore AI to see if it helps them. It may surprise you, especially for editing and modifying your own work. At the same time, artists need to get smarter. Protect what matters. Register your best work with the Copyright Office. You may not be able to cover your entire archive, but you can cover collections or individual pieces. That is how you build a real defense.
AI is not going away, and neither are artists. The truth sits somewhere in the middle, not in the hysterics on either side. It is up to each of us to figure out what we accept, what we reject, and how we adapt. That is not the end of art. It is the start of a new negotiation, one where you decide how much of your creative life belongs to you and how much you hand over to the machine.
Disclaimer: The views in this article are my personal opinions. I am not a lawyer, and nothing here should be taken as legal advice. Copyright law is complex and depends on specific circumstances. If you have questions about your rights or need to take legal action, consult a qualified attorney.
