Mission Statement

As the technology behind generative AI grows rapidly, the lines between real human expression and generated content are becoming more blurred by the day.

Our mission is to build a community of artists who are against the use of generative AI in their craft, to raise awareness of the difficulties those in the arts are facing because of AI, and to make a statement that we believe the arts should stay human.

For us, art is not just about the end result, or a product. Art is about the journey.

It’s about learning, practicing, honing, experimenting, trying, failing & trying again. It’s about putting our deepest selves on display and creating something that can change our entire world, or at least help us understand it just a little better. Art is a sacred part of what it means to be human.

Keep AI out of the arts ✊

"Unrecognizable man painting in creative workshop" by Rachel Claire on Pexels

The Stay Human Society How it started

Hi, my name is Isaac.

Back in 2025, a friend sent me a link to a playlist on a popular music streaming service that was quite literally called “NOT REAL MUSIC”*.

It was a collection of AI generated “covers” of popular rock songs that has hundreds of thousands of listeners and tens of thousands of playlist saves.

As a millennial, I grew up in an era that was alive with covers of popular songs in different styles. Whether it was the BBC Orchestra covering Ibiza classics, acoustic versions of the heaviest metal songs imaginable, punk rock versions of great pop songs or just Weird Al Yankovic’s amazing parodies, I’m no stranger to listening to (and thoroughly enjoying) someone else’s creative vision interpreting an established piece of music and making it their own.

In much the same way that Noel Gallagher has famously said that if things were different maybe he could have written Yellow by Coldplay; the idea of an individual artist or a band covering and reinterpreting someone else’s music has always fascinated me. It’s like a portal into another universe. Music, like all forms of art, can take you on a journey that transcends space and time in a way that nothing else can.

So, when I was presented with a playlist of covers filled with songs I was familiar with, but that had been simply “generated” by a cold, soulless pattern-recognising machine learning model rather than being created, crafted, obsessed over and given life by human beings, I found the usual excitement that I would normally feel replaced by a new, unique and troubling sensation that I had not felt yet up until that point in my life.

Soon after, I came across a harrowing quote from the co-founder and CEO of the AI music platform Suno (valued at $2.45 billion) from earlier in the year…

“It’s not really enjoyable to make music now,” he said.

“It takes a lot of time, it takes a lot of practice, you need to get really good at an instrument or really good at a piece of production software.”

“I think the majority of people don’t enjoy the majority of the time they spend making music,” he added.

That feeling I had felt a few weeks earlier came back with a vengeance, and I found myself getting physically upset by it. It felt like something inside my very soul was being threatened for the very first time, something sacred, something once untouchable… the artist inside of me was now at risk somehow.

I don’t have the eloquence, the articulation, or frankly the webpage real-estate to put it quite into words just how strongly I disagree with Mike Schulman’s statement here.

But I can say this…

I don’t know of a single artist, a single musician, a single painter, single sculpter, a single photographer – not one, who doesn’t adore the process.

Art isn’t about the end product. If the end product is great… it’s great! Sometimes it’s terrible, entirely subjectively, and that’s the point.

Art isn’t about “generating” a good (whatever good even means) end product. Art is about the process, the work, the reward.

These AI slop machines that you input a prompt to and they spit out something that is objectively “good” are trained on the plagiarised, stolen, uncredited works of millions of other artists. Work they have chosen to share online, work that has been taken without their direct consent and then stuffed into these models that are now worth billions of dollars.

AI has no soul, it has no humanity.

Some of the earliest evidence we have of humans creating art is scribblings on cave walls by human beings expressing love, fear & trying to make sense of the world around them.

Art is expression.

AI cannot express, it cannot create, it can only generate.

It reduces art to a pattern recognition exercise, and it makes me sad.

And so, the Stay Human Society was born.

Welcome. Stay Human. ❤️

Frequently Asked Questions

Do you hate all AI?

No, quite the opposite.

LLMs (Large Language Models) such as ChatGPT or Gemini have some great uses when seen as a tool to help with work or education, rather than something that can generate something new.

Summarising long and fragmented blocks of information for example, such as email threads or technical documentation is something it absolutely excels at. Or re-wording things down to a more understandable level, asking for metaphors or visual cues in order to help a concept or a problem make more sense. Using it as a natural language interface to interact with information rather than just reading it. The use cases are clear when viewed as a productivity tool. An LLM isn’t stealing anyone’s work when it’s explaining a political story to you, or helping you to rubber duck a problem.

Machine learning in general, as it used to be called before they started slapping the AI label on everything, has been around for decades and it’s been used in countless scientific breakthroughs, projects and products that make the world the vibrant and technologically advanced place it is today – all without the blatant and large-scale plagiarising of other people’s work that is now happening with generative AI.
So where do you draw the line?

We understand that everyone’s “line” is different. We’re only human after all.

For ourselves however, the line is where AI takes over from human critical thinking, the artistic process, the frustrating hours or even days where we just can’t figure something out, the boredom where a spark suddenly forges into existence, and the elation of turning that spark into something beautiful through human creation.

Outsourcing the journey, or even small parts of the journey, to a generative AI is the exact opposite of artistic expression, even if it generates something that gets you closer to where you want to be. Turning inspiration from a hard-won reward into simply a prompt takes away so completely from what it is to create art.

Humans, for hundreds thousands of years, have taken inspiration from other people’s art, some have even gone as far as copying it, but there’s a huge gulf between hearing someone else’s song or seeing someone else’s painting and loving it so much that you want to create something similar (but not the same) and just prompting a generative AI tool to make something for you and have it go and amalgamate an average of everything it’s been trained on… where is the soul in that?

Art connects us. AI does not.
I'm an artist, and I use this AI tool called XYZ in my workflow, can I still be a member?

A generative AI tool? No.

A machine learning/neural net tool that hasn’t stolen anyone else’s work to power itself? Absolutely fine.

Our hard and fast rule is that anyone using generative AI to create entire pieces of art, or parts of it – music, photographs, paintings, drawings, 3D printed models, animations, books, stories etc are not right for our community and we encourage our members to be vigilant and report users suspected of flaunting this rule. There are thousands of Pro-AI communities out there, this is not one of them.

After that, our argument is that we, as artists, managed to create beautiful art for our entire lives without generative AI tools and we should be able to continue doing so forever.

For example, “generative fill” functions in photography workflows still use training data that comes from other people’s images, and while the more reputable companies may train their models based on paid-for stock images, many do not, or have quietly updated their T&C’s to allow them to use anything anyone does on their platforms to train their models.

Another example would be DAW plugins in music recording workflows that turn humming into choirs or instruments still use training data that as come from other people’s sounds, and deliberately cut out either paying real people playing real instruments, or cut out paying for professional sampled instruments that were themselves created by paying real musicians, studios, sound engineers, computer programmers etc.

We realise this is nuanced, so we just ask that you use your best judgement.
Ah, but the Beatles used AI to bring John Lennon's voice back to life on their last song!

They did, but not using Generative AI.

They used advanced machine learning that was able to isolate John Lennon’s voice from an old recording, clean it up and reconstruct it – nobody prompted an AI to “sing these words in this key and make it sound like John Lennon”.
But I can't afford an expensive camera, recording studio time or paying musicians.

To quote the great Dave Grohl of the Foo Fighters / Nirvana:

Musicians should go to a yard sale and buy and old ******** drum set and get in their garage and just suck. And get their friends to come in and they’ll suck, too. And then they’ll ******** start playing and they’ll have the best time they’ve ever had in their lives and then all of a sudden they’ll become Nirvana. Because that’s exactly what happened with Nirvana. Just a bunch of guys that had some ****** old instruments and they got together and started playing some noisy-ass ****, and they became the biggest band in the world. That can happen again! You don’t need a ******* computer or the internet.

Artists have been creating and collaborating for centuries. The modern internet and social media influenced world has convinced us we need the most expensive equipment, the most skilled session musicians, the highest resolution cameras or the highest quality paints or brushes.

The truth is, you can create art by standing on a street corner with a stick and some bottles and express yourself. Having imperfect tools is what makes art imperfect. Imperfect art is what makes art human.
I use AI to give me ideas, then I go and create something myself. Does that count?

Again we think this is a nuanced position and really depends on you.

But let’s just consider for a moment how that exact process might be done, from a music point of view, before generative AI could just spit out a sample of other people’s work masquerading as it’s own.

You’d hop on the bus to town, excited to visit a record store. Maybe a friend told you about a band, or there is a CD that you want to check out. While you’re there you spot an album that just catches your eye for some reason. As you’re reading the liner notes, someone else in the record store spots you and they lean over to tell you that the CD you’ve just picked up is their favourite band. There’s fire in their eyes and passion in their voice when they talk about it, and you feel like you’ve just made a friend, because you have. You’ve connected with another human being over the art that you’re about to experience, art that could legitimately change your life. You take this, and a collection of CDs home and you discover something wonderful. After listening to the songs on repeat for weeks you decide to see the band live. The next thing you know, you’re standing in a room with thousands of people feeling the same things as you, all connected, all enjoying this incredible creation. It washes over everyone like nothing else. You go home and pick up your guitar, or sit at your piano, and you feel inspired to create something of your own because of this shared experience you’ve just had. Over the weeks, months or even years that come, those first notes blossom and bloom into the very sound of the inside of your soul. Every time you play them, or even thing about them, you come alive. You are an artist. You are human.

… or you just ask one of these slop platforms to give you an idea.

We know which one sounds better to us!

* playlist name changed