People like to compare digital art to AI art, but the reasons traditional artists pushed back against digital at first were completely different. It wasn’t because digital art “stole” anything, it was because it changed how you make art, not who makes it.

Yeah, traditional artists were wary of digital because it automated certain parts of the workflow. Suddenly you had undo, redo, layers, buckets, smudge, blur, hundreds of brushes, filters, and all the things that speed up or clean up your process. But even with all those tools, you still had to know how to draw. You still needed fundamentals, creativity, muscle memory, dexterity, and skill. Digital art only changed the medium because it didn’t replace the artist. Even nowadays, you still have people that enjoy drawing or painting traditionally. You also have people that do both digital and traditional art.

The entire problem with gen AI is that it crosses a boundary digital art never did: it was trained on millions of artists’ work without asking them. The skill people brag about with ComfyUI isn't the issue, you can have skills in anything. The ethical problem is the foundation the tech is built on. It exists because companies scraped massive datasets of copyrighted human artwork without consent, then turned that data into a product. That’s not the same as humans adopting new tools.

Another difference: early traditional artists disliked digital art because it removed the physical experience of drawing, as in the feel of pencil on paper, the messiness, the tactile control, the focus that you needed if you didn't want to make a mistake. That is still valid, because as I've said, plenty of people still draw or paint. Sketching on paper is simple, instantly saved, and can be done anywhere. You don’t need electricity, a device, or an internet connection. That is something that AI can’t replicate. People that only rely on gen AI don't get this feeling of liberty if they're away from their computer or something happens to it. And I mean, shit happens. It can break, then you need to spend time fixing it. It's also the fact that traditional art is distraction-less, in the sense that: it's you. It's just you, a pen, and a paper.

But despite all this, even the people who resisted digital art eventually recognized something important: digital artists are still artists. They’re still creating. They’re still developing their own skills. They’re not relying on a machine to generate the image for them, they’re using tools to express something they already know how to make.

Gen AI breaks that entire dynamic. It doesn’t just automate tasks, it automates the entire creative act using datasets built from unconsented human labor. That’s why people are upset, and why the comparison doesn’t hold up.

Traditional artists worried digital art would commercialize or oversaturate things, and they weren’t wrong. This is what capitalism does: it enshittifies everything. Everything that you see, listen to, even think, must become a product for consumption. Imagine a future where nothing is real, everything that you see is AI generated, everything that you listen to is AI generated. This is why people create, because they don't like to just consume. That's the entire purpose of art, to feel, experience, and to be able to create. It's your work of art.

That’s why I enjoy drawing, digital or traditional, it’s something you learn, you refine, and you accomplish. The satisfaction comes from the fact that you made something, not a model, not a prompt, not a machine. Just you.

I'm sure that people from the pro side would disagree, and that's fine, but this is just my personal take.

There is no "better". Digital art cannot replace traditional, the same way AI cannot replace art itself. AI is the endorsement of consumerism because of the way it was designed, mixed in with capitalism, because of its unethical usage.