If your tattoo was designed by AI, does it have a soul?

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Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Kaarina Vuorinen was about five hours into getting a tattoo when the artist holding the needle made a confession. He hadn’t actually drawn from scratch the gothic sword she requested before permanently putting it on her left shin.

Instead, he used artificial intelligence to design it. “He was kind of proud," says Vuorinen, a 30-year-old dental nurse in Helsinki. “I was like, in shock.

I was so disappointed." She let the artist finish the job, which he told her included some personal touches, since at that point the tattoo was nearly finished. “It’s pretty, but it doesn’t have a soul," she says. The rise of generative AI tools like ChatGPT and Google Gemini has given people an easier and faster way to handle all sorts of tasks, from writing speeches and making songs to producing videos and creating logos.

Users simply type out prompts describing what they want and seconds later the programs return results made from large language models trained on massive amounts of online data. Yet for some body-art enthusiasts, AI-designed tattoos are taboo. They argue that a true tattoo artist doesn’t just put ink on people’s skin but is also responsible for drawing the images by hand, from start to finish.

They also worry that AI image generators are built off professional artists’ work without permission. “You’re essentially cheating," says Matt Doherty, a 41-year-old tattoo artist in Sicklerville, N.J. “It’s like doing sports on steroids." Using AI to design a tattoo also can produce bizarre results, warns Doherty, such as images of hands with extra digits or bodies with missing limbs.