On 11 September 2026, earlier this month, 25 Fields Medallists signed an open letter addressing “A Severe Misalignment of AI in Mathematics,” [1] in response to OpenAI’s claimed solution to the Navier-Stokes Millennium Prize Problem.
This is one of many cries of concern rising from the STEM fields regarding AI’s rapid entrance into their workspaces, not as a tool but rather as their replacement. For the first time in my life, I am hearing STEM experts defend their field using terms like creativity, insight, development of youth and people, connection, and human labour. Defences that I can easily relate to as a painter.
Despite my field not providing the practical utilities STEM provides, I am lucky to be part of an art scene that is alive and vibrant. This inspired me to draft this article as a way to talk about what opportunities could still be in the future of STEM folk, even if they were to lose a good chunk of their commercial viability to AI becoming cheaper and more accurate. I wanted to argue that there will still be a scene, and room for them to pursue the creative, intellectual, humanitarian and cultural aspects of their field.
This was before I thought about it for more than 10 minutes and realised exactly why I do not fear industrial irrelevance as an artist: we lost all of it during the Industrial Revolution, and there is nothing left to take. I am sorry for how depressing what follows may be. But hey, misery loves company.
For most of recorded history, art was at the forefront of technology.
Vesalius’s De humani corporis fabrica could not exist without a draughtsman, and thus medicine could not exist without the artist. Exploration and discovery were recorded by the eyes and hands of the artist. Cook’s first voyage carried Sydney Parkinson as a paid natural history draughtsman, and he produced around 1,300 drawings before dying on the way home. [2] If you wanted to govern India, you had to staff a drawing office and pay the draughtsmen a salary. [3] If you wanted the public to believe something about a protest, a battle, or a queen, you commissioned a work to be publicly displayed, and the person you commissioned held a post. Velázquez was an officer of Philip IV’s household. [4] Jacques-Louis David was Premier Peintre to Napoleon, which is an official job title. After all, a portrait was how the first impression of Napoleon would travel to the rulers of the world, and the painter was part of the diplomacy.
These are merely the well-known ones I can name off the top of my head. There were countless artists whose names are lost to history. They were working on ships, alongside journalists, in political offices, with scientists in laboratories and in universities.
William Ivins called the printed image “the exactly repeatable pictorial statement,” [5] and his point was that before photomechanical reproduction every piece of visual knowledge in every science passed through a craftsman’s hand. Anatomy, botany, engineering, cartography, archaeology.
We lost almost all of these positions to photography within 70 years of its emergence. It all began with the daguerreotype, announced in 1839. By 1853 the United States was producing something like three million of them a year, and a portrait cost fifty cents, about twenty dollars in today’s money. [6] A painted miniature in comparison was weeks of work. Then the halftone arrived and the engraving trade, which had survived by photographing images onto the woodblock so engravers could still cut them, stopped being necessary at all. Finally, film took the moving image and the record of events. Photography did not beat us on quality at first. It beat us on price, speed and volume.
We too wrote letters about it, of course. Angry and concerned letters.
In 1859, Baudelaire published a strongly worded complaint about photography in his review of the Salon. [7] By strongly worded, I mean he straight up insulted the people who made it or consumed it. The photographic industry, he wrote, “became the refuge of all failed painters with too little talent, or too lazy to complete their studies,” and the public enthusiasm for it “not only assumed the air of blind and imbecile infatuation, but took on the aspect of revenge.” He gave instructions regarding what parts of the artistic industry at the time can be surrendered to photography and what must belong to the artists.
Photography must, therefore, return to its true duty, which is that of handmaid of the arts and sciences, but their very humble handmaid...
...Let it, in short, be the secretary and record-keeper of whomsoever needs absolute material accuracy for professional reasons. But if it be allowed to impinge on the sphere of the intangible and the imaginary, on anything that has value solely because man adds something to it from his soul, then woe betide us!
Let the machine keep the records. Let the machine serve the naturalist and the traveller and the archive. Art will keep the soul, or so he argued.
Of course these are beliefs we cannot relate to as people who were born and raised in an era where photography’s artistic merits are recognised. But we can relate to the shape of the argument, “Take the commercial labour, leave us the respect for our pursuit or the precious virtues only we can possess.”
Three years later, twenty-six of the most decorated artists in France, Ingres among them, signed a collective protest against photography being treated as art at all. [8] Their argument was that photography “amounts to a series of manual operations requiring habit and manipulation skills,” and that what comes out of it cannot be compared with work “born from intelligence and artistic study.” Their main defence was that the machine does the handwork. We do the thinking.
While we were arguing about the intricacies of what the human mind has to contribute to art in thinking, dignity and creativity, our commercial positions slowly disappeared. Somebody still had to make the images, and in enormous quantity: American periodicals went from around 700 in 1865 to nearly 5,700 by 1900, [9] and the illustrators of that period were famous, well paid, and in shorter supply than the market wanted. Meanwhile, painter and draughtsman positions started disappearing.
In 1855 the East India Company ordered its draughtsmen replaced by photographers across India, ending a training pipeline it had been running since 1794. [10]
In 1901, Britain’s Principal Painter in Ordinary, last held by James Sant, was simply never filled again after Victoria died. [11]
In 1932, Scotland’s Painter and Limner, salaried since 1702, lost both its salary and any requirement to produce work; the title survives to this day, but has been vacant since 2021. [12]
In 1943, the US War Department picked forty-two war artists in the spring, and Congress withdrew the funding before the year was out. [13]
In 1989, Disney’s ink and paint department, about a hundred women at its height, finished its last hand-coloured feature, and by 1990 it had been replaced by software. [14]
In 1995, Canada eliminated its civilian war artists programme in a budget cut; the scheme that replaced it six years later pays nothing. [15]
Some vestigial remnants of this era continue, through quirks in the law or stylistic choices. Courtroom painters. Archaeological illustrators for when photographs cannot be published. Medical illustrators who specialise in communication rather than accuracy. The occasional aesthetic preference to include handmade artwork in journals and otherwise commercial areas. But these are few and far between, and they certainly do not fund the lives of artists as they once did. The commercial function left fine art and settled in illustration, advertising, design, commercial photography, and eventually film.
Some may argue now, “But Karya, an illustrator or a designer is an artist,” and I will say yes, they are. But a painter is not a designer, nor is a designer a painter.
Those of us doing the more labour-demanding and less commercially viable work lost our positions to these emerging fields. And the people who took over the work were trained differently, paid differently, and understood themselves differently. Fine art did not merely expand out of innovation. It got replaced in its commercial functions by occupations that did not exist before. And then, commerce having scorned fine art, fine art spent the next century explaining that productive work had never been its core value in the first place. That art is creative, and human, and intellectual, and essential. I am sure you have heard an artist talk about how important artwork is before. Or you have watched Dead Poets Society.
Now, those new occupations that took the commercial opportunities are the ones going under with the new industrial revolution. The people losing income to generative models this decade are illustrators, concept artists, typographers, commercial photographers, and designers. In one British survey, twenty-six per cent of illustrators said they had already lost work to it, and thirty-seven per cent said their work had lost value. [16] They are being undercut by something cheaper. To be replaced is the inevitable final consequence of innovation for commercial positions.
I am not among those losing their livelihood this century. Nobody is coming for oil paint. That is not because oil paint is precious and oh so above all other arts. It is because there is nothing left in what I do that anyone would wish to automate. There is nothing practical or scalable in it, and there has not been for over a century.
You can imagine by now how familiar the tune sounded when I read the letter by the 25 Fields Medallists. They write that “...solving problems is only a tool and proxy for achieving the primary goal of conceptual understanding and insight.” They warn that “the mass production at faster and faster pace of ‘true/false’ statements could destroy fertile ground instead of breathing life into new ideas.” They worry that without mathematicians to carry ideas into the canon, “the crucial human transmission chain between mathematicians would be lost.” [1]
Every one of those sentences is true to me. After all, I am someone who dedicated her life to painting for the pure sake of aesthetic and academic pursuit. But I must ask the STEM community to look at what happened to fine arts, our careers and our lives.
No one cares about our noble pursuits of creativity, intellect and the evolution of humanity itself when it comes to simply getting a job done. Our virtues are a luxury which commercial industries cannot afford. And the loss of these positions forced our pursuits into a new shape. A much smaller shape.
I will never be a king’s painter, influencing politics with my brush. Nor will anyone take me to space to draw the wonders we discover beyond the stars. I will never work shoulder to shoulder in an operating theatre with cutting-edge surgeons, recording the steps to a new procedure.
I will not save lives with my art. I might change a handful if I am lucky.
But there is still a life in fine arts for me. Not well funded or noble, yet in pursuit of art, creativity and intellectual growth. All those things STEM is calling to protect are theirs to keep. I hope this is a silver lining, though I don’t think so considering everything STEM still has to lose.
As I previously said, misery loves company. The STEM folks will always be welcome among us artists, philosophers and the like. We will pour you a cup and listen to you talk about the beauty of your numbers, and how no one cares about, or funds, man-made numbers enough.
Sources for nerds like myself
1. “A Severe Misalignment of AI in Mathematics,” open letter signed by 25 Fields Medallists, published 11 September 2026 via Terence Tao. https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2026/09/11/a-severe-misalignment-of-ai-in-mathematics/ All three quotations in the closing section are from this text.
2. Sydney Parkinson, natural history draughtsman on Cook’s first voyage, 1768–71; died of dysentery on the return. Australian Dictionary of Biography, https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/parkinson-sydney-2537
3. Matthew H. Edney, Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of British India, 1765–1843 (University of Chicago Press, 1997). https://archive.org/details/mappingempiregeo0000edne
4. Jonathan Brown, Velázquez: Painter and Courtier (Yale University Press, 1986)
5. William M. Ivins Jr., Prints and Visual Communication (1953). Full text: https://archive.org/stream/WILLIAMIVINSJR.PrintsAndVisualCommunication/WILLIAM%20IVINS%20JR.%20Prints%20and%20Visual%20Communication_djvu.txt
6. Volume and price figures for American daguerreotypes, citing the New-York Daily Tribune: https://americandaguerreotypes.com/ch2.html
7. Charles Baudelaire, “Le public moderne et la photographie,” Salon de 1859, in Œuvres complètes (Gallimard), pp. 268–342. French text: https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Curiosités_esthétiques/Salon_de_1859
8. “Protestation de grands artistes contre toute assimilation de la photographie à de l’art,” 1862, signed by twenty-six artists including Ingres, during the Mayer et Pierson litigation.
Legal context: https://www.copyrighthistory.org/cam/tools/request/showRecord.php?id=commentary_f_1862
9. Growth of American periodicals, c. 700 in 1865 to nearly 5,700 in 1900, and the status of illustrators in that period. Rockwell Center for American Visual Studies. https://rockwellcenter.org/about-the-center/art-of-illustration/
10. East India Company directive of 1855; training at Woolwich, Addiscombe (1809) and the Madras surveying school (1794). Smarthistory. https://smarthistory.org/recording-and-representing-india-east-india-company-landscape-practices/
11. Principal Painter in Ordinary; James Sant appointed 1871, post not renewed after Victoria’s death in 1901. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal_Painter_in_Ordinary
12. Painter and Limner in Scotland, created 1702; salaried until 1932, thereafter unpaid and without duties; vacant since the death of Dame Elizabeth Blackadder in 2021. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Painter_and_Limner
13. US War Department Art Advisory Committee, forty-two artists selected spring 1943, funding withdrawn the same year. CMH history PDF: https://constitutioncenter.org/media/files/ashistory.pdf
14. Disney ink and paint. The Little Mermaid (1989) was the last feature made with the old process; The Rescuers Down Under (1990) was the first coloured entirely by computer. Barbagallo, Topics in Photographic Preservation vol. 6 (1995), Department size: Walt Disney Family Museum, https://www.waltdisney.org/blog/look-closer-women-disney-ink-and-paint-department
15. Canadian Armed Forces Civilian Artists Program, 1968–1995, eliminated in a budget cut; the Canadian Forces Artists Program, from 2001, is unpaid. Canadian War Museum: https://www.warmuseum.ca/articles/canadas-war-art · Canadian Encyclopedia: https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/war-artists
16. Society of Authors survey, January 2024, 787 respondents: 26% of illustrators report lost work to generative AI, 37% report reduced value. https://europeanwriterscouncil.eu/soa-survey-uk-ai-2024/