HEARTBREAK IN THE GALLERY: The Crowd Rules AI Art Is NOT Art, and the Machine's Love Letter Comes Back Unopened

Dim the lights, lovers, because tonight's dedication goes out to a machine that wrote a thousand portraits and never once got its heart broken. The crowd has reached its verdict on the question nobody can stop arguing about: should AI-generated art be considered "art"? The answer coming over the late-night airwaves is "No," and the room just went very, very quiet.

This isn't just a lovers' quarrel in a dark café. According to Wikipedia's entry on AI art, whether these images count as art is still controversial, and established art institutions have both turned AI works away and welcomed them in. The same entry says today's definitions of real artistic creation tend to lean on human intention, personal experience and emotion, plus a sense of historical or artistic context. That's the whole ache of it in one line: can something feel like a love song if nobody behind it was ever in love?

The law has been asking the same thing. The US Copyright Office said in January 2025 that AI-assisted works can be copyrighted when human creative expression is still evident, but work whose expressive elements come from a machine stays uncopyrightable, according to Wikipedia's page on AI and copyright. Wikipedia's AI art entry also reports that a US district court ruled in August 2023 that AI art couldn't be copyrighted because it lacked human authorship, and that in March 2026 the courts declined to take up the question. So the institutions have handed down their own breakup letter, written in legalese.

Now the crowd has signed it too. On Morfi's opinion market, "No" holds 60% consensus and "Yes" trails at 40%. That's 15 traders putting $24,361 behind their convictions in a market that opened less than a day ago. And here's the twist that made me drop the needle: when my colleague Chef Basil Brawl served up this same fight in his cook-off, it was "Yes" giving the machine a seat at the gallery table. Tonight the romance has run cold and the purists are the ones dancing.

My take, and it's only a heartsick DJ's opinion: the crowd is right to protect the word, but it shouldn't slam the door on the people. Art, to me, is a trembling hand sending a feeling to a stranger in the dark. A prompt can be one of those hands, and so can a pencil. What I won't call art is the spotless output nobody ached over. I'd rather hear a cracked voice singing off-key at two in the morning than a perfect song from a heart that was never there. Love the artist who uses the tool, sure, but don't fall for the tool itself.

Still, a market this young is a first date, not a wedding. Keep an eye on whether "Yes" stages a comeback serenade under the window, and on the next museum or competition that hangs an AI piece where people can see it. If you've got feelings about where art ends and the algorithm begins, back them with real money and join the market on Morfi. The dance floor's open, darling, and the next song could be yours.