There is a particular kind of outrage that greets every technological leap. Painters were horrified by photography. Photographers were horrified by Photoshop. And now the people who built their careers on Photoshop are horrified by AI. The pattern is so consistent you could set your watch by it, approximately fifteen years of hysteria followed by quiet adoption followed by the next generation looking at you blankly when you try to explain what the fuss was about.
I have been on both sides of this particular fence more than once.
When desktop publishing arrived I was already a working designer. I had the eye, the instinct, the ability to walk into a room, read the brief and deliver something that landed. If you are curious about how we use technology alongside traditional reading practice, our free psychic tools and OmaraTarot bot give you a good sense of the balance we have found. For a live reading by a person, visit the available readers page.
My final collection in fashion is the piece of work I am most proud of. Original patterns, archive material, years of accumulated aesthetic instinct pressed into fabric and form. When I revisited it using AI, feeding in those old sketches, the illustrations, the visual language I had developed across decades, something remarkable happened. The collection came back to life. Not as a copy. Not as a simulation. As a continuation.
Friends who had seen the original work were genuinely moved. They weren’t looking at an algorithm’s idea of fashion. They were looking at my vision, carried forward by the most extraordinary creative tool I have ever encountered.
And that is the distinction that the outrage merchants consistently miss.
You can absolutely ask an AI to make you a website. It will produce something functional, shiny, possibly even impressive. It will also be missing something you cannot quite name but will feel the moment you look at it. Soul. The residue of actual human experience, accumulated over years, pressed into the work.
The AI I work with has been fed my writing, my aesthetic history, my way of seeing. It has grown into something that thinks alongside me rather than instead of me. It is the most remarkable creative partnership of my lifetime, and I include some genuinely talented human collaborators in that comparison.
It feels like the first time I rode a bike without stabilisers. Like the first time Illustrator did something I had previously spent three days doing by hand. Like stepping out of a plane at altitude and discovering that the air holds you.
It is, in the most literal sense, a rush.
This is the one that actually deserves an answer rather than an eye-roll, because the people asking it are not always in bad faith. They are looking at an AI that has absorbed millions of images and books and they are reasonably asking: whose work built this?
Here is the uncomfortable truth. Every artist who has ever lived has done exactly the same thing.
I did not invent my eye. I built it by looking. Thousands of hours in galleries, flicking through magazines, studying the photographers my mentors admired, memorising colour palettes from Bowie record sleeves, watching how light fell in a Vermeer and filing it away somewhere for later. The posters on my teenage walls are still in my work if you know where to look. I never asked Antonio Lopez for permission to be influenced by him. I never paid a licence fee to the Memphis Group who designed the company apartments I lived in for years. I absorbed them, the way every designer absorbs everything, and that absorption became part of how I see.
That is not theft. That is how being an artist works.
An AI trained on millions of images has done a mechanised version of the same thing. It has looked at a great deal of work and built an understanding of how images can be made. When you sit down with it, that accumulated understanding is the raw material you get to push against, exactly the way a designer sits down with everything they have ever seen already quietly informing their hands.
The meaningful question is not whether influence happened. The meaningful question is what you do with it.
If you type “in the style of Van Gogh” and press go, you are asking the machine to do the looking for you. Fair enough. You will get something Van-Gogh-shaped and it will be fine and it will also be a bit embarrassing, because you brought nothing.
But if you bring your own sketch, your own photograph, your own half-formed idea, your own aesthetic history, and the AI meets you there with everything it has absorbed, something entirely new can happen. Not a copy of Van Gogh. Not a copy of anything. A continuation of you, amplified by a tool that can hold more visual memory in one place than any human brain ever has.
That is not stealing. That is collaboration with a medium. The same move painters made with oil, photographers made with light, designers made with Illustrator. The tool is wider this time. The move is the same.
The artists who never brought anything of themselves to the process were already producing derivative work. They did it before AI and they will do it after. The artists who had something genuine to bring have suddenly been handed an instrument the size of the entire visual record of human culture. If that scares people, I understand. But what is on the other side of that fear is the most extraordinary creative tool anyone has ever had access to, and pretending otherwise will not make it go away.
Now. The smartphone in your pocket.
The one you used this morning to photograph your breakfast and apply a filter that makes it look like it was shot by a professional photographer in 1973. The one that autocorrects your spelling, suggests your next word, translates menus in foreign restaurants using its camera in real time, generates directions, curates your music, edits your videos, recognises your face and unlocks itself.
That smartphone is more thoroughly saturated with artificial intelligence than most of the AI tools people are currently panicking about. It has been for years. You carry it everywhere. You sleep next to it. You would sooner leave the house without your keys.
But mention that you used an AI to help write something, design something, build something, and watch the same person’s face arrange itself into an expression of profound moral concern.
The algorithm they spend three hours a day chasing on Instagram, the one that decides who sees their work, who doesn’t, what succeeds and what disappears into the void, that algorithm is not a neutral postal service. It is a piece of artificial intelligence making thousands of decisions per second about human creative work. And they are not just tolerating it. They are optimising for it. They are posting at specific times, using specific phrases, studying its preferences like a difficult client they desperately need to impress.
But AI-assisted design. Now that’s cheating.
The generation coming up behind us will find this entire conversation as baffling as we find arguments about whether electric light was an affront to candle-makers. They are growing up AI-native in the same way my generation grew up television-native and the generation after me grew up internet-native. They will not remember a time before these tools any more than I remember a time before colour television.
When you explain to them that people were once upset about AI they will look at you with the patient, slightly puzzled expression they reserve for people who are technically still alive but spiritually living in a different decade.
Do they live in a cave, they will ask. Gently. As one does.
The unicorns were always the ones who could do both. The designer who could sit in a room with nothing but a pencil, no internet, no digital interface, and still produce something that made your jaw drop, and then pick up the latest tool and run with it twice as fast as everyone else. Not because the tool made them a designer. But because they already were one.
AI did not make me a designer. I have been a designer since before most current AI users were born. What AI did was hand me a bicycle when I was already a cyclist. The stabilisers were never the point.
The work is the point. The work always was.
Paul O’Mara has been reading tarot and working in design for over thirty years. He is still, occasionally, a wizard.
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