By Anfernee Chansamooth
With AI learning to imitate artists in seconds, artist Anton Pulvirenti pushes back on the idea that creativity can be coded.
“Human creative art is irreplaceable because humans feel, and we have experiences,” Pulvirenti, who works from his studio in Gosford, said. “We’re going to make things that it would never think about. AI doesn’t have emotions. It can’t get jealous, as far as we know. So, what it does is more predictable in that sense.
“And it is best as a tool. I tend to view it as having, like, an assistant in the room that is very base level, like either a researcher or someone that can knock out a quick sketch or test out a few compositions. That’s where it’s really good,” he said.
His perspective reveals both the possibilities and the limits of AI — and raises a deeper question at the heart of this story: in the age of automation, what remains uniquely human?
Pulvirenti grew up in Brisbane, the child of an Italian father and Anglo-Australian mother who met in art school while studying commercial art at the government-funded Central Technical College.
After a stint in the graphic design department at Woolworths, his father opened a screen-printing studio beneath their house. It produced political posters, stickers and billboards — filling the home with the constant smell of acetone, ink and machinery.
Watching his parents work six days a week taught him early that creativity wasn’t glamorous — it was labour.
“I knew you had to work hard to be an artist to make any money,” he said.
The industry, he recalled, was “thankless,” full of darkrooms, chemicals and heavy equipment. That was his introduction to professional art-making.
Today, his own practice is wide-ranging and rooted in physical presence. He works across charcoal portraiture, colour paintings, wall pieces and large 3D pavement drawings created directly on the ground.
A lot of his work looks backwards to history — including pieces about his grandfather’s WWII internment — or reacts sharply to the social issues unfolding around him. Over the past decade he has drawn at protests, covering refugee rights, climate change and, more recently, the conflict in Gaza.
He still takes commercial commissions for 3D street art and produces comics and observational drawings from life.
Pulvirenti is also recognised internationally for pavement art. He won Champion Pavement Artist at Sydney’s Chalk Urban Art Festival in 2007 and represented Australia at Italy’s 40th Incontro Nazionale dei Madonnari, one of the world’s major street art festivals.
His work requires technical precision and the ability to perform live in public — something he believes clearly separates human artists from AI systems.
That physical, public nature of art-making shapes how he views the current wave of AI-generated images, many trained on scraped artwork taken without permission. Pulvirenti does not mince words.
“These companies are exploiting artists. They’re not paying you to scrape your work. They keep the profit. The government has to play some sort of role, and the government can’t seem to regulate these people,” he said.
The federal government’s October 2025 decision to reject a copyright exemption for AI companies relieved many creatives, but uncertainty remains about which parts of the industry will be hit hardest.
Pulvirenti believes junior designers are the most at risk.
“The sorts of artists it’s replacing, I think, are entry-level designers. Simple design it can do quite effectively — they’re the ones that are going to lose their job,” he said.
Yet AI is part of his workflow when deadlines stack up. He uses it to brainstorm ideas, test compositions, and produce fast drafts. On one recent job, he said the number of required changes would have been “physically impossible” to complete manually. AI helped him cycle through rough ideas quickly.
He also uses it for creative writing and imaginative reconstruction — like generating fictional wartime letters between his grandparents, filling in gaps history didn’t preserve. For him, that messy, early idea-testing phase is where AI is genuinely helpful.
Still, Pulvirenti is clear that AI only works well for artists who already understand the fundamentals.
“I think what is going to be important in this age is still having the skills to be able to tell the AI what you want,” he said.
Without that grounding, he believes artists can get overwhelmed by endless AI outputs without the ability to judge what’s actually good.
Where he draws the firmest boundary is live work.
“AI is fun until it’s got to turn up somewhere and do something live — then it’s in trouble,” he said. “With what I do, I’ve got to come out in public and get a paintbrush out and actually do something. And AI is not going to help you.”
For Pulvirenti, the debate isn’t about banning technology or pretending the tools don’t exist. It’s about holding on to the parts of art-making rooted in human experience — the emotion, physicality, intention and presence that can’t be automated.
AI might speed up the production of images, but it still can’t replace the person who decides why the image matters — at least not yet.
Featured image: Artist Anton Pulvirenti making art in his Gosford studio. Photo: Anfernee Chansamooth
