Back when AI art first hit the spotlight, it felt like magic—new, rare, and full of mystery. In 2018, a piece called Edmond de Belamy, created by the French art collective Obvious, was auctioned at Christie’s for over $400,000. It was trained on just 15,000 classical portraits. The portrait itself was blurry, faceless, and haunting—and it made history.
It wasn’t just about the art. It was about what the art meant. It was the first time the world paused to acknowledge that a machine, given the right guidance, could produce something emotionally resonant. Something that made us wonder: “What is creativity? And who gets to be called an artist?”
But that moment, as revolutionary as it was, quickly faded.
Fast forward to today: AI models are trained on millions of images. They’re more powerful, more refined, and capable of generating visuals that are deeply complex and breathtakingly beautiful. We can now ask an AI to show us the Color of Grief or the Sound of Silence, and it responds—not with randomness, but with mood, symbolism, and an unexpected depth.
And yet... most of these works barely get noticed.
From Novelty to Noise
The early hype surrounding AI art has dissolved into a sea of content. AI-generated images are everywhere—shared, scrolled past, and often dismissed as disposable. The wonder has been replaced by an assumption: “It’s just AI. Anyone can do that.”
But that’s not entirely true.
Not everyone can craft a meaningful prompt. Not everyone thinks in metaphor. Not everyone can translate an emotion like grief into color, or silence into space. AI may be the tool, but the vision still belongs to the human behind it.
The Color of Grief is not just an image. It’s an emotion encoded in strokes of digital paint. The Sound of Silence is not a landscape—it’s the space between thought and feeling, expressed without words.
So What Happened to the Value?
We’ve confused volume with meaning. In a world flooded with generative art, rarity is no longer about scarcity of output—it’s about scarcity of intent.
The early AI art pieces were valuable not just because they were the first, but because they represented a shift in how we think about creativity. Now, that shift has happened. But we stopped listening. We stopped telling stories.
And maybe that’s why the magic feels like it’s gone.
It’s Time to Bring Back the Wonder
Maybe the answer isn’t to chase hype again—but to slow down, reflect, and create with intention.
Let’s not just generate images—let’s create art that speaks. Let’s bring back the stories behind the pixels. Let’s craft prompts that feel like poems. Let’s build collections that carry emotion, not just style.
There is still wonder in AI art.
We just need to start looking—and listening—again.
