We Spoke To 5 Artists About Generative AI's Place In The Indian Creative Landscape

Just 5 years ago, generative AI was fathomable only on the silver screen or in the pages of a book, sandwiched between tales of time travel and flying cars. Today, almost everyone has this all-knowing, scarily capable technology sitting in their pocket, ready to be their tutor, therapist, lover, or whatever else they desire. We’re at a transitional point in history, marked decidedly by what came before and after the widespread availability of generative AI. 

Opinions around generative AI, particularly those expressed online, fall quite distinctly into one of two camps: 1. “AI is the best thing to ever happen to humanity,” or 2. “AI will lead to our social and creative downfall.” These sensationalised takes make sense in our current climate; AI usage has proliferated rapidly over the last three years, and we can’t run fast enough to catch up. Every corner of the internet now employs AI in some way, or is overflowing with AI-generated content, but we don’t definitively know anything about it. Questions about ethics and long-term impact remain unresolved, leaving gaping holes in our understanding of what to expect in the next year, let alone the next decade. 

The contention around AI reaches its peak when discussing the arts. AI tools like Midjourney and Suno have fundamentally changed creative industries forever. A request as inane as “make me an impressionist painting of a dog on a skateboard” or “make a hyperpop song about the Second World War” will leave you with an ostensibly refined final output within seconds. What once took years of training and hours of effort can now be distilled down to the moment you press 'Enter'. To some, this is a democratisation of the arts, a creatively empowering miracle tool. To others, AI art is a desecration of their craft and a danger to their livelihood.

As a writer, I personally don’t use AI, and must admit that ChatGPT and all its LLM cousins scare me. Though I choose to believe, largely for the sake of mental self-preservation, that AI can’t replace me, I can’t deny the fact that the world is significantly restructuring because of its capabilities. Change is here, whether we like it or not. 

It’s human nature for our brains to compartmentalise information to make sense of the chaos around us. And yet, it may be too early to classify generative AI as definitively ‘good’ or ‘bad’. To investigate these shades of grey, I asked five homegrown artists, ranging from AI enthusiasts to vehement opposers, about their perspectives on AI art, its ethics, and how generative AI can, and already has, impacted creative industries.

AI Art’s Creative Value

Art has famously been a difficult concept to define. Scholars and philosophers throughout history have dedicated their lives to capturing art succinctly through words, to no avail. Plato described art as mimesis, a recreation of nature; Tolstoy called it “a means of union among men, joining them together in the same feelings”; the historic aesthetics scholar Morris Weitz decreed attempts to define art futile altogether, because of its ever-changing essence. The one consensus that we can reach, however, is that creating art is an inherent human behaviour. After all, art has been integral to every culture and civilisation in all recorded history. 

With generative AI, technique is no longer a barrier to entry in creating something new, removing some aspect of human touch from the equation. For this reason, many critics consider AI-generated works of art to be invalid, or at the very least, less valuable than those created manually.

3D artist and beat-maker ROHO falls within this camp. ROHO’s instrumental music and visualisers explore sci-fi futurist concepts, and yet, his work and life in general are largely untouched by AI. He only uses it in its most minimal form: through the Spot Healing Brush tool in Photoshop. To ROHO, “Art is too distinctly human, reliant on real-life experience, and filled with organic taste to ever be replicated by artificial intelligence to the same quality or depth as art made without it.” Through this perspective, art is not just about a final output, but the journey it took to get there. Every brush stroke on a canvas, every layer added to a song’s mix, is a direct reflection of an artist’s intention.

SCayos, a multi-talented music producer, composer, and performer, agrees. Although he isn’t necessarily anti-AI, his involvement in every step of the creative process is what keeps him satisfied. “I think in a result-oriented world, where you can click a button and it gives you back a finished piece of work, or a finished song, or anything like that, you’re taking the fun away,” he said when discussing his own decision not to use AI in his work. SCayos works under five different artist pseudonyms, using each to explore a different genre or creative process when making music. To him, the act of creating isn’t a means to an end, but one of the most important and enjoyable aspects of being a musician. 

SCayos maintains this mindset as a listener, too. He cited Bon Iver’s 2007 album, For Emma, Forever Ago, as an example of how process can transform the way a work of art is received. The singer recorded the album alone, with a single mic in a remote cabin in Northern Wisconsin while facing illness and going through a breakup. The knowledge of his struggles and the accompanying understanding that his work was tragically personal deepened the impact of Bon Iver’s music. “Would my sheer perception of the fact that it was made not by a human being, but by a model, impact my listening experience for that piece of work?” SCayos reflected, “100% yes, for me.”

AI In The Creative Process

But many AI users would argue that they have complex processes of their own. 3D and AI artist Jishnu feels misunderstood by the notion that all art that uses AI is “one-click and done.” He stated, “While it’s true that simple prompts can generate images, creating something meaningful or powerful requires layers of research, selection, reiteration, and post-processing. It's easy to look over the hours, or sometimes even weeks, spent refining a single concept. AI usually becomes one step in a larger creative process, as it still takes real human vision and effort to turn noise into narrative.”

Jishnu’s work blends 3D animation and AI together to bring psychedelic, ancient mythology-inspired worlds to life. When describing his creative process, he stated that he only used AI “when a concept feels unique enough to need it, or when other tools like 3D may be limited by their own technical bounds.” He doesn’t consider AI to be a cheat code; rather, he “treat[s] the AI more like a collaborator than a generator, crafting custom prompts based on requirements and refining the outputs across iterations to achieve a post-modern/futuristic vision of the Ancient.”

AI artist Prateek Arora also believes that the discussion around AI lacks nuance. “Even though there is a lot of tutorial-style content about AI art and filmmaking, there is very little in-depth thematic or philosophical exploration of what creative processes look like while using AI, beyond the obvious questions about tools and technology. So people are confusing this lack of high-quality content around process in AI art, with a lack of process altogether,” he explained. 

Arora started as a science fiction writer, then moved to photography and worked in the entertainment industry. In his work, he “often encountered a lot of resistance to new ideas, aesthetics, and genres.” When generative AI became readily available, he had the opportunity to carry out his vision without barriers or pushback. To him, AI is a tool that he can wield to bring his imagination to life. He starts every new piece with a story or theme, taking his time to flesh his ideas out on pen and paper before generating and refining his pieces. He considered, “Can AI be used to create bad or low-effort work? Sure, but so can a digital camera or an illustration software. It is the human’s intention that leads to this, and nothing intrinsic to the tool or process being used.”

Even artists who manually create their final art piece sometimes use AI to supplement their process. Photographer Saurabh Narang told me, “I view AI simply as a tool available to artists, much like a pencil or a camera. The quality and depth of art depend on the artist’s experiences and skill, not on the tool itself.” While he doesn’t use AI when taking or processing his photos, Narang believes “it’s almost impossible not to use AI in today’s digital world!” Although he would prefer to rely on human assistance, AI fills that role by supporting him through mundane administrative tasks and background research. This speaks to another potential strength of AI; before, only the privileged had access to full-time support. Now, anyone can have their own personal assistant. 

Whose Art Is It, Really?

By far the greatest matter of dispute when it comes to generative AI boils down to a question of ownership. AI models are trained by large datasets consisting of pre-existing works. Midjourney, one of the most popular AI image generation tools, for example, was trained on an initial data set of 20 million images, with an additional 2 million added to its database every month. ChatGPT, amongst other LLMs, was trained by essentially everything publicly available on the internet.

The fear that AI tools are blatantly ripping off artists’ hard work is justified. The content used to train AI models can be taken, used, and mimicked without its creators’ consent. The repercussions of this were made apparent when Studio Ghibli-inspired AI art went viral a few months ago. While your aunties and uncles’ AI Ghibli WhatsApp DPs may seem harmless, the fact that such a specific art style, Miyazaki’s intellectual property, could be duplicated en masse was unquestionably a problem.

ROHO referred to this as a “fully unethical scheme,” going on to say that “trying to distil the millions of collective hours spent by artists into vending machine levels of easy 'creation' feels wrong to me, and devoid of spirit.” SCayos also finds the way AI companies train their models problematic, stating, “I think with how big it is, how much money there is in it, and the scale of how it's been operating, they’re assuming a 'do now, ask for forgiveness later' approach with a lot of it.” 

Even Jishnu, an AI artist himself, expressed concern over the datasets used to train popular AI models. “As someone who made art before AI and has had multiple instances of my work plagiarised, I understand how important consent and ownership are,” he said. He went on to explain, “I tend to avoid general tools that are trained on datasets that include unlicensed art. Instead, I train custom models locally using open-source or public domain materials, or I feed in my own photography, renders, or textures. It’s important to me that the outcome reflects my vision, not a remix of someone else’s, as I believe AI should assist originality and not exploit it.”

On the other hand, many AI artists aren’t using these tools with the intention of copying other people’s work. In Arora’s view, the belief that AI is inherently plagiaristic is an unfair and reductive evaluation of the technology. “It’s inaccurate to think of training as 'copying’. ‘Learning from’ is a better analogy.” From this perspective, AI tools take inspiration from other works, rather than simply reproducing them. “Throughout the history of art and creativity, we have learned from everything that has come before,” Arora says. “Nothing is ever created in a vacuum. Ultimately, you have to remember that AI is a tool — it is not alive, it does not have agency.” Responsibility, here, boils down to the person using AI, and not the tool itself. “It's no different from using any other tool or working in any other medium.”

What The Future Holds

Whether you approve of AI or not, there’s no denying that it’s here to stay. The questions we really need to be asking ourselves are: how can we responsibly use AI moving forward, and how are creative industries going to transform as a result of increasing AI usage?

AI has already made its mark on the arts, with AI-generated content growing increasingly popular by the day. The Velvet Sundown, an entirely AI-generated band, has over 1 million monthly listeners on Spotify and its homegrown equivalent, Trilok, at least on the surface, seems to be gaining some semblence fan following. Even artists who aren’t entirely AI-dependent are integrating the technology into their work. Iconic Indian fashion designer Rahul Mishra, for instance, told Vogue that he uses ChatGPT when conceptualising his collections, though he intentionally goes against its suggestions to keep his work fresh and unexpected.

Jishnu and Arora believe that AI’s rising prominence opens new doors for all creatives.  Jishnu likens previous technological developments to what’s happening today, expressing that “it's like the internet broke open access to knowledge, and now AI is breaking open access to execution.” In the same vein, Arora shared that he thinks art/filmmaking/storytelling/content will all become more interesting, more diverse, more thematically dense and complex.

"New methods bring in new voices to existing creative fields, and also create new fields,” he explained. Where you once needed a large set of resources and a whole crew, you now only need to prompt a machine with a few sentences, making the execution of grand artistic visions more accessible to the masses. 

However, this understandably raises the fear that current artists will become obsolete. Arora recognises that it’s not all going to unfold like a utopian dream. “AI will, and already is, having some disruptive effects on professional pathways within the creative industries," he said. "Up-skilling, reskilling, and responsible legislation to mitigate the effects of this disruption is important and immediately needed.”

This concern over artists’ security is one of the few aspects in which Arora and ROHO’s views on AI converge. While ROHO’s ideal future limits generative AI usage in creative fields altogether, he concedes that that’s probably not going to happen. Instead, he hopes that industries limit their use of generative AI as much as possible and with as many guardrails as possible to prevent idea theft. Certain AI companies, such as the music generation platform Suno, suggest that they already have measures in place to inhibit attempts at plagiarism and copyright infringement. But, concurrently, they refuse to reveal the database used to train their AI models. What we need from them, and all AI companies, is transparency and the promise that they will value the rights of all artists, not just their user base. 

But Narang disagrees that this will be possible, or necessary. He believes, “AI won’t fundamentally change the struggles artists face,” stating, “I fear that 'fair and responsible AI' might become the next 'greenwashing', similar to carbon credits.” His views on AI’s future are complex. On one hand, he’s hopeful that ethical debates around AI can be squashed by collaboration between artists and technocrats. On the other, he’s afraid AI could make us complacent and diminish our ability to think and create independently. With AI as an option to turn to, there is a possibility that people won’t nurture their creativity moving forward, relying heavily on its artistic capabilities instead. This loss of artistic curiosity is a worst-case scenario, and something that can only be combatted if we continue to nurture all art forms. 

The last, but most important point in this discussion is one that has yet to be mentioned: AI’s environmental impact. While SCayos is curious and open-minded about the creative upsides of AI, his reservations with it concern its immense energy consumption, water waste, and high carbon emissions. MIT professor Dr. Noman Bashir notes that a generative AI training cluster can use seven to eight times more energy than a regular computing load. With the skyrocketing levels of AI usage across the globe, AI data centres will consume far more than we can afford. According to the International Energy Agency, by 2026, the amount of electricity used by just North American cryptocurrency, data centres, and AI will equal 4% of the entire world’s energy usage. These numbers are obscene and indisputably the biggest downside of the AI revolution.

AI may be a permanent fixture in our lives from here on out, but that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t work towards improving the conditions of its use, for the sake of both our artists and our planet. Change is inevitable, but we can control the course it takes. The first step to doing this is to understand, to the best of our abilities, what it actually is that we’re working with. I’m not here to tell you what to think. Reading this may have left you more confused on your stance than you were before, but maybe that’s a good thing. In the long run, the debate around AI isn’t about choosing sides; it’s about paving a more just, creatively open way forward.

Follow ROHO here.

Follow SCayos here.

Follow Prateek Arora here.

Follow Jishnu here.

Follow Saurabh Narang here.

If you enjoyed reading this, here’s more from Homegrown:

How Mumbai’s New 'Iconic Buildings Policy' Excludes The City It Claims To Celebrate

Between Two Homelands: India, Palestine, & I

Growing Up On YouTube: How Indian Gen Zers Found Their Identity Amidst Digital Chaos