Picasso and Ai: Can Machines Recreate Genius?

Picasso is an innovative artist who created a new visual system and broke established artistic rules. However, the increasing number of AI-generated works that imitate Picasso’s style raises concerns that the value of his original creations may be diminished. AI can produce various images in a Picasso-like style through text-to-image generators such as Midjourney, DALL·E, and Stable Diffusion. These tools generate images by learning the characteristics of Picasso’s Cubism—geometric fragmentation, multiple perspectives, and bold color palettes. But is this imitation truly creativity?

Picasso’s invention of Cubism was not simply a matter of splitting forms into geometric shapes; it was a revolutionary act that challenged the long-standing Western assumption that objects should be viewed from a single perspective. In contrast, AI does not break rules or create new artistic paradigms—it merely reproduces existing patterns without intention, purpose, or self-directed innovation.

Indeed, the art world continues to debate whether “style itself should be protected by copyright.” If AI can freely imitate the style of a specific artist, many argue that such replication threatens the unique creative domain that belongs to human artists.

For example, AI images such as “Portrait in Picasso Cubist style” or “Guitar and wine bottle, Picasso synthetic cubism” clearly borrow from Picasso’s Analytical and Synthetic Cubism. The former reflects the fragmentation of the face into geometric planes and the use of multiple viewpoints, while the latter imitates the familiar collage elements and earthy color palettes of Synthetic Cubism. However, these works merely replicate surface patterns. They lack emotion, psychology, intention, and philosophical depth.

This raises the question: can AI-generated images truly be considered original creations when the foundational act of creation belongs to Picasso?

So, what is the essence of creativity? Creativity requires originality, intention, and contextual meaning. Human creativity emerges from real experiences—emotion, suffering, social context, and personal history. AI, on the other hand, produces outputs based on human-made data, without understanding or meaning. Creative ideas often break rules, dismantle existing frameworks, and combine concepts in unexpected ways—something AI does not genuinely achieve.

I once assumed AI could provide references for any unpredictable drawing task, but reality proved otherwise. When I was drawing a piece for my portfolio class, I could not find any reference image that matched what I needed. No matter how much I searched, AI could not produce a similar example. In the end, I relied solely on my own drawing skills and personal experiences. This experience strengthened my belief that AI cannot replace human creativity.

Additionally, AI cannot set its own purpose—questions like “Why did I draw this?” are impossible for it to answer. AI cannot assign meaning to its output or take responsibility for it. In contrast, human creativity arises from unpredictable thinking shaped by social context, emotion, pain, and lived experience. Solving artistic problems using one’s own memories and intuition demonstrates that human creativity is not simply “recombining data.”

Ultimately, although AI can imitate Picasso’s style, it is difficult to regard these outputs as creative. AI-generated images merely recombine the surface elements of Picasso’s work—color, form, composition—while lacking intention, philosophy, emotion, and historical consciousness. Unlike Picasso, who overturned artistic conventions and proposed an entirely new worldview through Cubism, AI remains limited to transforming what already exists based on prior data. Therefore, while AI can produce visually convincing images, its role is closer to that of an auxiliary tool rather than a human creator. The true origin of artistic creation remains human, and AI continues to function as a tool rather than a co-creator.