Hannah Einbinder recently made a pretty incendiary comment about people using AI creatively. Her argument, in essence, was that these people are losers. Not artists. Not creative. People trying to rob real artists of their gifts.

Here’s the full quote:

“The people who make this stuff are losers.  They’re not artists.  They’re not creative.  And they’ve wanted their whole lives to be special.  And they’re not special.  They’re trying to rob creative people of our gifts.  And you can’t.  And even if you try, you will never be cool.  You guys suck.  No one likes you.  Anyone who’s near you is because they crave power and access over any ethical standard.  You are a loser.  You will never be cool.  And you probably had a rolly backpack in high school.  I wanna put your head in a toilet and flush.”

It is an incredibly sharp thing to say.  And she’s painting with such a broad brush, it’s almost hard to see who she’s talking about…. The CEO’s, the engineers, the users, or the creators…

But beneath the insult is a serious point.

A lot of these tools were trained on work taken without meaningful credit, consent, or compensation.  That matters.  It’ss not a trivial footnote.  It’s the central ethical complication in this whole conversation, and it is one of the reasons AI feels different from so many earlier technological shifts in art.

That part should not be hand-waved away.

But once you move from condemning the system to condemning every person using the tools, the argument starts to break down.

Because the question underneath all of this is an old one…  Who gets to call themselves an artist?

I grew up around one version of that question.

My mother was an ex-model, photographer, and author of nineteen books, many of them New York Times bestsellers.  She always looked down on people in advertising.  Her disappointment in me going into that world was only partially offset by her relief that I might actually be able to pay my rent.   The age old question of art vs. commerce arose, even then…

Her view was that people in advertising pretended to be artists but were not really artists because they were getting paychecks.  They were not making a living from their art, in her eyes.  They were making a living by persuading Coca-Cola to buy their art and then forcing people to watch it.

It was a harsh view, but it was coherent.  And she had lived by the sword of that creative risk so, much like Hannah Einbinder, she was entitled to her opinion.

And then, in one of life’s little jokes, she ended up dying as Lady Lowe…  I am still convinced this was, at least partly, my fault…. When they met at dinner she would have normally turned her back but for him confirming that “Weeden and whatever” was ACTUALLY a very good agency and I was not, in fact, wasting my life getting stoned in Amsterdam.  Well, I wasn’t wasting my life, at least.

But the point remains.  Her test for artistic legitimacy had a lot to do with sacrifice.  If someone was paid reliably, commissioned, sheltered by commerce, or buffered from risk, they became creatively suspect.

To her, art had to cost you something.  Security mostly.

And Hannah’s position, whether she means it this way or not, belongs to a very old tradition.  The tradition that says art must cost you something.  That if you are not willing to risk comfort, security, status, maybe even rent, then your commitment is suspect. That real artists stake their lives on the work.

There is something noble in that idea.  I won’t pretend otherwise.

A lot of extraordinary artists have done exactly that. They have lived precariously, chosen the work over stability, suffered for it, and made things the rest of us are lucky to inherit. There is real courage in betting on yourself that way. There is real dignity in it too.

I’ve spent my life idolizing creative people who have done just that.  Directors, Agency people who set up their own companies, even the freelance crew members who risk their mortgage on a security free engagement, trusting that their talent will lead to more work.

But suffering is not the same thing as legitimacy.

Being willing to suffer for your art may make you a crusader.  It may make you brave.  It does, in many cases, make the work better.  But it doesn’t automatically diminish the people who want some encouragement before they leap.  It doesn’t disqualify the people who want to grow in public.  It doesn’t make every person using accessible tools a fraud.

Some people need a little positive feedback before they are willing to risk their lives and their rent.

That doesn’t make them less human.  And I don’t think it makes them losers.

Creativity has always been full of these tests.

If someone pays you, are you still an artist?  If your work has a client, are you still an artist?  If your art is made inside a system of commerce, are you somehow less pure?  If a tool makes part of the process easier, are you less real?  If you did not suffer enough on the way in, did you really earn the title?

Photography was once seen as mechanical theft rather than art.  Sampling was attacked as stealing.  Scratching records was treated as vandalism.  Synths were dismissed as fake instruments.  Drum machines were accused of killing feel.  Comics were treated as disposable junk.  Film itself was once thought of as low entertainment.

Every generation, it seems, finds a way to accuse the next one of fraud.

Stephen Fry has often made the point that, as someone who loves the English language, people expect him to stand against slang.  But he finds slang fascinating, because it is language doing what language has always done: adapting, shifting, inventing, finding new ways to make meaning.  Slang is not the sad little byproduct of language.  It is one of its defining signs of life.  Art is often much the same.  The people who care most about it are often asked to police its boundaries, when what they may actually be seeing is the medium changing in the hands of a new generation.

And often what sits beneath the accusation is not just concern for standards, though sometimes that is part of it.  It’s also anxiety about access.

Because new tools tend to do one deeply offensive thing: they let new people in.

I’ve watched so many panels talking about the next generation of creators and how much we need them.  Because, until humanity fixes the final bug of illness, ageing and death, the future of our industries literally depends on them.  But every time they try to come in through a side door, we tell them they’re doing it wrong.

Many young people, stripped of the opportunities many of us took for granted don’t know what the “right” way is… and isn’t that kind of our fault?  We’re masters of media, yet we’re completely incapable of doing what creators do… tell our own stories and amplify ourselves through a more social type of media.

These people, both young and old, are just picking up whatever opportunity is in front of them and they’re starting to make things at a velocity we can only dream of.

They are often clumsy at first.  Mostly derivative.  Sometimes embarrassing.  But creativity is a muscle and reps count…. So, not now, but maybe soon; they might just be brilliant.

And that’s how culture moves.  Always has.

Modern music producers don’t need to book a studio and hire an orchestra to make something lush and ambitious.  They can have an orchestra at their fingertips. They don’t have to pay session musicians unless they want to.  Most often, they don’t.

Are they artists?

Of course some are hacks.  Of course some are formula merchants.  Of course some are replacing craft with convenience.

But some are artists.

The presence of a new tool doesn’t settle the question.  It never has.

What makes the AI moment harder is that the ethical complaint is, mostly, correct.  This is not just another story about conservative critics sneering at innovation.  The training issue is real.  The consent issue is real.  The compensation issue is real.  The provenance issue is real.

So this is not an argument for naive equivalence.  AI is not simply the same as the synthesizer, the camera, or the sampler.  The moral circumstances are messier than that.

But even with that acknowledged, it is still a mistake to flatten everyone on the user side into one moral category.

There’s a difference between the companies that trained these systems on other people’s work without permission, the executives using them to cut labor costs, the mediocre opportunists using them to cosplay as makers, and the kid in a small town who loves images or stories or films and is using the first tool that has ever made participation feel possible.

Those are not the same person.

And if we are serious about art, we should be careful not to turn “protecting artists” into “protecting the exclusivity of being allowed to try.”

Because not everyone starts with access.  Not everyone starts with craft.  Not everyone starts with money.  Not everyone starts with permission.

Some people start with longing.

And longing has always made fools of people before it makes artists of them.

So yes, defend artists.  Absolutely.  Demand the 3 C’s: credit, compensation, and consent.  Draw hard ethical lines around exploitation.  Push back on the use of these tools as a blunt instrument for cost savings or cultural deskilling.

But don’t make the mistake of assuming that everyone who reaches for a new creative tool is contemptible.

Some of them are just people who want in.

And culture has always advanced because some of those people kept going.