Student Work Feature: AI on art by Evan Rogers
Is Artificial Intelligence Facilitating the Death of Creativity? I had barely settled in when the commercial break delivered something far more unsettling than the gory crime documentary I was watching. Coca-Cola’s latest holiday advertisement, fea- turing off-putting polar bears, trucks with too many axles, and humans with soulless eyes, was unmistakably generated by artificial intelligence. The “humans” moved with an uneasy stillness, imitating the warmth and nostalgia of Christmas without fully understanding it. It was a carefully packaged attempt to recreate the spirit of the season, yet something essential was missing. In a world increasingly shaped by digital technology, no creative phenomenon has sparked more fascination or fear than AI- generated art. While artificial intelligence dates back to Alan Turing’s groundbreaking 1950 paper on machine intelligence, its role in artistic creation is far more recent and increasingly unsettling. As machine-learning models evolve at exponential speed, AI art has made its way into magazines, social media feeds, and creative studios across the globe, challenging long-held ideas about creativity, originality, and what it means to make art. AI-generated ads in reputable magazines like Vogue. This rais - es the question: is human creativity really coming to an end, or is AI art the next step in a technology-focused future? For centuries, each breakthrough in media technology has triggered anxieties about the death of human artistry. The camera threatened painting; digital photography threatened film; Photoshop threatened reality itself. But generative AI feels different. It doesn’t just enhance human creativity; it challenges what it means to be creative. Ruth Skinner, a professor of digital humanities at Western University, believes AI is a tool that can be equally used for good and bad. “There’s a world where this is very exciting, from a creative perspective. But it’s important to also contextualize how those images come to be,” says Skinner. Unlike human artists, AI has no need to practice techniques, analyze perspective, or develop a personal style. It simply remixes what already exists and creates an output so polished it blurs the line between creation and replication. This unsettles artists who have spent years honing skills that an AI generator can replicate in minutes. “In the future, I see it becoming an issue,” says Karlie McCullough, an artist and Studio Art student at Western University. It only takes a few words in an AI generator to produce a full-colour, conceptualized image or video. Social media has been flooded with AI “slop,” defined by a 2025 Scientific American article as “mass-produced, low quality content.” We’ve even seen The Coca-Cola ad demonstrates how corporate AI integration has already reached audiences worldwide. The ad gets some things technically right: colour composition, texture, and shadows. But there’s a reason most characters are animals. AI still can’t grasp specific human characteristics, like how we hold a mug or the tiny imperfections that reveal our humanness.
Roboticist Masahiro Mori theorized the “uncanny valley” effect in the 1970s, referring to the unique discomfort that stems from something that looks almost human, but not quite. The question is not whether AI can create compelling images; it already does. The question is whether those images can carry the emotional weight we expect art to hold. If AI eventually mimics human emotion so precisely it passes for genuine, does that make it a truly creative entity? Skinner pushes back on the idea that creativity is exclusively human: “animals have been making art from the beginning of time.” If creativity isn’t an inherent human characteristic, should it be extended to machine learning? Before AI, online media carried a tentative assurance of authenticity. With the advent of complex image generators, creating false images and propaganda is as easy as writing a short prompt and waiting a few minutes. Even I, watching a video testing whether viewers could spot AI-generated content, got almost all of them wrong. As Ellie Smith, a second-year Art History student at Western, admits: “It’s really hard to tell the difference. I have definitely saved an AI-generated image or two on Pinterest.” According to a 2025 KPMG survey, 48% of Canadian students say their critical thinking skills have deteriorated with increasing AI use. Students aren’t asking to ignore AI’s existence; they want institutions to provide the literacy tools to navigate a workforce that not only accepts but embraces it. One thing remains unchanged: creativity has always been a response to the world we live in. And today, that world includes generative AI. The Coca-Cola commercial may have failed to capture the warmth of Christmas, but it succeeded in revealing the fault lines of a new artistic era. For now, we stand in the uncanny valley, staring at almost-human faces on our screens, wondering what comes next.
CAMPUS VILLAGER • 2026
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