As AI changes tattooing, the things it can’t replicate become more valuable. If you understand that shift now, you’ll build the kind of tattoo career that’s much harder to replace.
AI and Tattooing: Everyone Is Asking the Wrong Question
Since 2022 the conversation about AI has been dominated by one fear. “Will it replace us all?” Commentators constantly feed that fear by warning of skynet style terminator futures as tech moguls build a brave new world that actually just looks like left-over props from Robocop 3!
Honestly, I think it’s mostly smoke and mirrors. I’ve worked and survived at least 2 of these digital revolutions and lived long enough to see how the promises and the truth differ. And yeah, they differ.
History shows us that technology rarely destroys creative professions. Mostly it changes what people value within them and that’s an important point. Technology doesn’t usually remove value. It just moves it. Every major technological shift has done exactly that.
Photography.
Digital music.
Desktop publishing.
Social media.
Now it’s AI.
The winners weren’t the people who rejected the technology. They were the people who understood that the humans create the value – always have, always will. Then they simply leant into that.
So I don’t think the biggest question is whether AI replaces artists.
If technological shifts change what becomes valuable… what actually is going to become more valuable in this latest ‘revolution’?
AI and Tattooing Are Changing What We Value
Markets, to use a business term, don’t reward effort. They reward scarcity. Diamonds cost more than coal because they’re harder to find. Right?
So, when technology makes creativity easy to fake, diamonds become coal, right? And that’s most people’s fear, I think.
When everyone can generate an image, images stop being scarce. But they’re not real diamonds are they? They just look like them.
And they can be passed off as the real thing by just about any trickster to the naive or the people who don’t care as long as it looks like the real thing. That’s how counterfeit products have always worked.
I was talking with my son the other day and he summed up AI graphic design in a way that I think is perfect. He said to me that AI generated graphic design looks like what happens when the designer can’t say no. And as any graphic designer will tell you, just like in tattooing, the client is almost never right!
AI isn’t making creativity less valuable. It’s just exposing who valued creativity in the first place.
It isn’t turning diamonds into coal.
It’s turning coal into fake diamonds.
And just like anyone who’ll buy a counterfeit, if your only concern is producing images as cheaply as possible, AI is extraordinary.
When everyone has access to the same technology, everyone can achieve the output. Everyone can ‘create’ something that once required a skill that they don’t have.
Everyone can have fake diamonds. So what becomes scarce?
Well, if you’re buying judgement, experience and trust, that’s where the real diamonds come in. The judgement behind the image. The years behind the judgement. The taste behind the years and the creativity behind that taste.
With any counterfeit, what’s always missing is the input – the stuff your brain is full of that makes you, you. The lived experience that created the output. That’s the stuff that makes our art valuable. Without it you just get pictures.
AI has access to billions of finished images. It has access to almost none of the lives that created them.
And Art has never been ‘just a picture’…
That’s where the real value lies. So, where’s the value in our artform?
Why AI and Tattooing Make Human Creativity More Valuable
To get a tattoo somebody has to trust another human being to make permanent decisions on their body, on their behalf and that human had to spend years learning and practising the craft in order to be able to tattoo confidently.
The more common AI-generated images made into tattoos become, the more valuable evidence of genuine ability becomes. And that’s why I don’t think any technology diminishes great tattooists. I think it makes the great ones easier to recognise.
And that’s why I think we’re heading towards a human renaissance. And not just in tattooing, across the creative spectrum.
Not because artists will reject technology. Because clients will begin valuing all those things that technology simply can’t fake. They’ll start to see its failings. Humans are hardwired for exactly this. We’ve evolved to notice when something pretending to be real… isn’t. That’s why the uncanny valley response exists: a feeling of unease, creepiness, or revulsion that people experience when seeing objects or digital creations that mimic reality imperfectly.
Short term, I think we’ll see two things start to happen. First, an outright hatred of any and all AI. Secondly, mistaking quality and skill for evidence of AI due to a kind of hyper-vigilance against it. I talked about this in a recent episode about AI, so I felt it first hand. But, having had a bit of time to think about it, I think the minefield that this creates for all skilled professionals is actually exactly where our advantage lies.
But some of us might have to get used to a few changes…
AI and Tattooing Mean Process Becomes Proof
For years we’ve treated drawing as something you do privately. To improve. To be better at the job tomorrow. We’ve all spent years honing our skills on the couch after work and for many of us this is our last private ‘happy place’.
I’ve written before about why learning itself has become one of the biggest competitive advantages creative people have.
I know it’s mine and I’m very protective of it.
But, I think it’s got to become something else.
Our clients, our ‘audience’, will find it increasingly difficult to spot the fakes as the technology matures and the only answer – I think – is to prove ourselves.
Our practice ritual needs to become evidence.
Process videos.
Thinking out loud.
Sketchbooks.
Failed ideas.
Iterations.
They’re no longer just interesting content. They’re evidence.
Our creative thinking needs to be presented front and centre in our content. Clients won’t just be buying the final tattoo. They’ll increasingly need to feel confidence in the person creating it and the process behind it.
Showing your process won’t just make interesting content. It’ll become a business advantage.
How I Think AI and Tattooing Should Work Together
People assume there are two camps.
Use AI vs. Reject AI.
I don’t think either approach makes sense. Technology should do the mundane work for creative people. Not the creative work for mundane people.
This is exactly how I use AI to help make this show. It’s my production assistant in charge of SEO and deliverables and it’s my marketing analyst in charge of reading graphs and pie charts.
Basically it does everything that I find boring. So I can spend more time thinking.
Drawing.
Creating.
Talking to clients.
Doing the work only I can do.
The Human Renaissance Is Just Beginning
The next decade belongs to artists who become impossible for tech to imitate. As technology makes production abundant, human judgement will become more and more scarce.
The easier technology makes creation… The more valuable genuine creators become. And that changes what clients value. It changes what audiences value.
And I think tattooing is one of the industries that’s about to feel that shift first.
People are calling this the age of AI. I’m not.
I think historians will look back on this time as the beginning of a human renaissance. Not because we rejected technology, but because a small group of artists reminded us of what only humans can do.
How am I so confident about this?
Think about the future I joked about at the top of this piece. That Robocop-inspired sci-fi B-movie that I find laughable. The irony isn’t that people are trying to automate creativity.
It’s that the people trying hardest to automate creativity grew up inspired by stories, films, music and artwork created by human beings.
The answer was never the technology. It was always the human being using it.
Because over the next decade…
Demonstrating the skills technology can’t replicate won’t become less valuable.
They’ll become your greatest business advantage.