We have been building websites for a long time now. Long enough to watch tools come and go, and long enough to notice a pattern.
Every time a new tool arrives, people push back. They say art made with the new tool is not really art. They said it about the printing press. They said it about the camera. They said it about Photoshop and Illustrator. They are saying it now about AI. And we understand, change is hard. It can feel like something is being lost.
But we have come to embrace these new tools, because we have seen what they actually do: they open doors.
Some believe art cannot be art unless it is made by an artist. But who decides who qualifies as an artist? We already celebrate conceptual artists who work entirely in ideas, artists whose vision is the art itself, executed by others or by machines or by time. The concept is the contribution.
Who is an artist?
So what about a small business owner who has a vision for their brand? They know exactly what they want to communicate. They understand their customers, their community, their story. If they use AI to bring that vision into the world, why should we dismiss them?
We think they are artists too.
Here is what we have seen and why we believe what we believe.
At Design Web Louisville, we have had clients come to us with AI-generated images, a logo concept they created, a visual direction they explored. They ask us to refine it, to convert it into proper file formats, to make it work across their website and print materials. Sometimes that means completely redrawing the design in vector format. Sometimes it means significant revision.
And honestly, this is not new.
Back in the day, people brought us logos drawn on napkins. Rough sketches. Ideas scribbled in the margins of notebooks a magazine ad with text written across an image they liked. The execution was never the point, the vision was. AI is just a different way of sketching. It’s the newest best napkin sketch and it’s so helpful for those who are afraid to try to create with their hands.
Ai opens doors to new artists who create with ideas.
We respect all artists. Firstly, we pay our artists well; photographers, illustrators, developers who create animations. They all use different tools. What they share is vision, and the ability to direct their tools toward that vision. So before you start in with how Ai is stealing jobs, at least for our small part of this industry we still pay the same artists the same wages. Partly because we love our team and entirely because they deserve to be compensated for their work, regardless of the tools they use.
A hammer does not build a house. A camera does not take a photograph. And AI does not create art. People do. The tool is just the tool.
This pattern repeats throughout history. In 1492, the German abbot Johannes Trithemius wrote that “printed books will never be the equivalent of handwritten codices.” In 1474, a Venetian scribe named Filippo de Strata called the printing press a “meretrix” (prostitute) and petitioned the Doge to ban it entirely. In Paris in 1476, a group of scribes attacked and physically destroyed a printing press, fearing it threatened their craft and their livelihoods.
Nearly four centuries later, the same arguments emerged against photography. In 1859, the French poet Charles Baudelaire called photography “art’s most mortal enemy,” warning that it would corrupt true art thanks to “the stupidity of the multitude.” Many painters believed the camera required no skill, no vision, and that it was purely mechanical, and therefore could never be art.
And more recently, in the 2000s, digital artists faced the same dismissals. Traditional artists rolled their eyes at Photoshop. The criticism was familiar: the computer was doing the work, not the artist. Digital art was not “real” art.
And here we are, still full of art, still creating, still animating and building and producing. The best work is still guided by the vision of the person behind it.
The raw truth, Ai isn’t even faster than traditional art. You still have to research the design, check it against IP that already exists, scour it for little failures like extra fingers and other funny things like oddly shaped stars in flags. It is not a fast tool because it requires so much QA and scrutinizing, it’s not even a cheap tool, costing more per month than most stock photography membership services when you use the professional level of access and use, and that price is bound to increase since the current model is running at a loss.
What Actually Matters
It is the humanity in the words, not the perfection in the grammar. It is the person, not the polish. The direction is what is beautiful. That is what we respect, and that is what we look forward to seeing, hearing, and experiencing more of, from anyone brave enough to pick up the tools and try.
AI will change everything. But it will stay the same too.
Design Web Louisville is an employee-owned web development company. We build websites, and we believe anyone with a vision deserves help bringing it to life.
