BOONE — Daniel Weaver, a recent Appalachian State graduate who does graphic design and freelance work, was thrilled when a local bakery asked him to create its logo.
Weaver developed a series of sketches with a vibrant color palette consisting of blues, greens, pinks and yellows, highlighting a waterfall cascading into a river. He sent them over, excited at the possibility of securing a client.
While negotiating the price for his work, the company chose to use an artificial intelligence-powered image creator. They stopped responding to Weaver and opted for the AI logo instead. He lost the contract.
Weaver was unimpressed by the new design.
“I thought they were subpar compared to my work,” he said. “I would have loved to see another artist on that, even if it wasn’t me, but it saved them 300 to 400 bucks on their project.”
It was the third time in his fledgling career that he lost work to AI.
A quarter of illustrators and more than a third of translators have lost work due to generative AI, according to a Society of Authors study published in April 2024. Additionally, they found that almost two-thirds of fiction writers and over half of non-fiction writers fear that generative AI will reduce income from their work. These fears are not without cause.
In its 2025 future of jobs report, the World Economic Forum found that the graphic design field is projected to be the 11th fastest declining job from 2025-30.
Weaver, a tattooed punk-rock drummer, artist, writer, graphic designer, and founder of the brand “Imperishable Crowns,” is one of many creatives whom generative AI has replaced. Instances like Weaver’s contribute to the growing fear amongst creators that their careers and livelihoods could be at risk.
Companies have faced backlash from consumers online, with comment sections full of replies calling the ads “slop” and accusing the companies of putting in “zero effort.”
Despite consumers’ disdain, companies have persisted in AI-based advertising. iSpot reported that during the Super Bowl, 23% of commercials featured AI. AI involved ads averaged 11% lower likability than non-AI involved ads.
Case Cleaves is one of these consumers.
“I think using artificial intelligence to generate images is totally immoral, I think it’s just a misapplication of that technology,” Cleaves, an industrial design major, said. “I think it should not be done. We were getting along fine before people started doing that.”
During winter break, Cleaves and his friends went to the theater to watch a movie, but during the ads before the movie, the Coca-Cola Christmas ad started playing. Out of protest, Cleaves and his friends booed throughout its runtime.
“It’s really screwed up to go and see a movie that people have worked really hard to make, but first, you’re subjected to a bunch of computer-generated filth that’s generated by prompts from people who don’t want to spend the time to make something cool.”
While Cleaves sees AI as a moral and aesthetic failure, Jason Wallace — graphic designer and owner of Huzzah Books— sees it as a facet of capitalism’s current regime.
Wallace graduated from Pratt Institute, an art and design school in Brooklyn, in 2019, with a BFA in Communications Design with a concentration in Graphic Design.
Before starting Huzzah Books, Wallace held several graphic design internships and, since then, has maintained a steady stream of freelance work, ranging from flyers for locals in Boone to a logo for the University of Texas.
From his studies and what he’s heard from those in the design field, Wallace said the middle of the 20th century was design’s golden age in America, due to businesses’ willingness to pour substantial funds into it. Wallace pointed to designers Paul Rand and Saul Bass as examples of designers who were “paid to play.” He said that since this apex of design, the assets companies are willing to use for artistic visuals have plummeted, prioritizing quantitative data that results in “dollar signs.”
Wallace said that this golden age of design, when compared to modern-day design, seems like “a mythology.” In his eyes, a shift began around the late ‘80s and early ‘90s when “budgets shrunk, jobs became less specified and more generalized through digitization, and lifelong practices were reduced to an almost clerical simplicity of what has essentially become button pushing.”
“We’ve been watching the extended fallout from that time throughout the 21st century. It’s bleak,” Wallace said. “AI is just the newest development.”
Although Wallace has a dim view of the industry on an economic level, calling it “a very convenient tool for commerce,” he doesn’t believe that AI can replace human art, for one reason: the process.
“I subscribe to the idea that the final thing is an artifact of a process,” he said.
He and a college friend were working on a long, ambitious publication that was printed entirely in newsprint. Newsprint is extremely absorbent; if water touches it, it will suck it up immediately.
Wallace wanted to show his professor the project’s draft, but it was raining. He traveled across campus, carrying the piece hidden beneath his shirt. He made it inside with the piece unscathed, or so he thought. While unveiling his project from beneath his shirt, a single drop of water fell directly onto it. Despite it ruining his initial vision of the piece, something new was created.
Wallace said the water spread through the paper’s CMYK colors — cyan, magenta, yellow and key (black), the four inks used in print — pulling out blues and reds that resembled the early stages of a bruise. He described it as a “beautiful, perfect splatter.”
“I couldn’t have placed it any better if I had come up with the idea, and if I had come up with the idea, I don’t even know how I would have done it,” Wallace said. “For a split second, I was like, ‘oh (crap)’, and then I was like, ‘oh wow.’ And so I showed my friend, and we were like, ‘Of course.’ So we scanned that and got a high-resolution scan, and that became the cover. And no, AI could not ever do that.”
He said his whole experience as a student led to the crescendo of the lone water drop. He considers this an expression of humanity, which, in his eyes, is something AI lacks.
That same theme — human connection as AI’s blind spot — runs through Liz May’s perspective on music.
May, an assistant professor of Music Industry Studies at App State, has spent her entire career on the business side of music.
In 2003, she founded a recording and live sound production company. She has also managed venues, booked artists and produced events across the industry.
She said that AI isn’t new to the music industry, but it’s been used across different mediums under different names, including MIDI patches and autotune.
“I think its limitations come down to the non-human qualities of things. Particularly in music, that’s what people love about music, it’s a human connection that they’re making with the artist, the writer, the performer,” she said. “People want to have that personal connection, and you don’t have that in AI.”
May doesn’t fear AI in music; she views it as a tool to increase efficiency. Still, she does draw the line once it infringes upon human creativity, becoming the artist.
“The last thing that we should want AI to do is to take our creativity away, I think that’s the big thing. It’s one thing to have AI spell check, or as a calculator. You know, fix this, or figure out this formula … those are processes,” May said. “But as soon as we say, ‘you do the creative part, I’m gonna put in the prompt, here’s all my parameters,’ then we ask the AI generator to create the creative part, we just lost a bit of our human quality.”
Although AI is not a formal part of her class, May said it’s something she’d like to incorporate. She already weaves discussion about AI’s uses and consequences into class time when possible.
“I challenge them to do a lot of research on those topics and form an opinion about it themselves, and not just go along with what everybody else does,” she said. “Every time you choose to use an app, every time you choose to engage with something, you’re voting for that. You’re basically saying, ‘I support this’, and you help grow that.”
May’s point about consumer choice finds a real-world echo in Olivia Bell’s work.
Bell, an App State alumna with a bachelor’s in commercial photography and advertising, is an intern at women’s clothing brand Altar’d State. Her work consists of editing photos and videos, creating social media posts, and assisting with product photography.
Bell’s work consists of editing photos and videos, creating social media posts, and assisting with product photography.
Bell said that in her role, she seldom touches AI. And from what she’s seen from Altar’d State, they do the same. Yet she still knows that AI is a rising tide in her field.
She mentioned that there are multiple AI systems, such as Kittykat.ai, where users give the AI an image of a product, and it generates multiple versions of the image, displayed in different settings or styles, tailored to the user’s prompts. Product detailing like this is a large part of Bell’s job, so for an AI system to easily do it is “a little scary.”
“I guess, in theory, if the company I’m working at wanted to do that, it would probably save them a lot of time,” she said.
Bell believes the future of human-made art lies in consumers’ hands, pointing to clothing brand Anthropologie as an example. She and her peers admire the company for its handcrafted, tactile displays.
“People are paying so much money to buy from Anthropologie because they value artists,” she said. “I just think there’s a lot of value in human-made art, especially when advertising for something.”
A recent Pew Research Center study found that many in Gen Z feel strongly against AI-generated art, echoing Cleaves’ opinion. It found that 66% of adults under 30 say they would like a painting less if done by AI, and 53% would like a song less if they learned it was written by AI. In contrast, only 36% of Americans 65 and older said they would like a painting less if AI created it, and only 26% would feel the same about an AI-generated song.
For Weaver, who has felt the sting of AI displacement firsthand, Gen Z’s skepticism is grounds for hope. He knows that choosing human artists will cost more — in time or money — and that there’s a risk creatives may produce something that doesn’t market well. But he believes those costs will return in an “infinite amount of blessing.”
“We need to have people willing to take the chance on beauty and on art, rather than on a dollar figure,” Weaver said. “I think that we have real hope here with Gen Z. Authenticity is huge for us. It could be super dope what you’re doing, but if it’s inauthentic, you’re getting the middle finger from Gen Z.”