I posted a case study recently. An AI-generated spec advertisement. I was transparent about the tools, the process, and the limitations. I explicitly said the output has serious problems. That it is not production-ready. That it is not a replacement for the real thing.

None of that mattered. The comments came anyway. The DMs came anyway. "Slop." "Soulless." "You're killing our industry."

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I understand. I genuinely do. But I want to talk about why that reaction happens, because it is older than any of us, and it follows a pattern that has repeated almost identically at least twice before in creative history.

Why the anger comes before the reading

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There is actually an academic term for what a lot of creative professionals are experiencing right now. Researchers have named it Creative Displacement Anxiety, or CDA. It is distinct from general stress about technology. CDA is specifically tied to the essence of human identity and self-worth as a creator. It is not about whether you can learn a new tool. It is about whether who you are still matters.

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When your identity is built around being irreplaceably human, and a machine appears to mimic that, it feels like an attack on your essence. Not your job. Your self. That is why people see the letters A and I next to each other and their nervous system fires before their reading comprehension does. It is not stupidity. It is self-preservation. The brain treats an identity threat the same way it treats a physical one.

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So I am not here to tell anyone their anger is wrong. I am here to say it is not new.

"From today, painting is dead."

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Around 1840, the French painter Paul Delaroche saw one of the first daguerreotype photographs and reportedly declared "From today, painting is dead."

Painters had spent centuries as the sole producers of realistic images. Portraits, landscapes, historical scenes. If you wanted a visual record of something, you hired an artist. Then suddenly there was a machine that could do it in minutes.

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The art establishment's reaction was immediate and vicious. Critics called photography a thoughtless mechanism for replication, one that lacked the refined feeling and sentiment of a man of genius. Charles Baudelaire, arguably the most influential art critic of the 19th century, was convinced photography was the refuge of every painter too ill-endowed or too lazy to complete his studies and that it had contributed to the impoverishment of French artistic genius.

Sound familiar? Swap "photography" for "AI" and "painting" for "VFX" and you could post that on any subreddit today and it would blend right in.

Here is what actually happened.

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Photography was not even considered an art form until the 1890s, over fifty years after its invention. For decades it was treated as a scientific curiosity, a toy. Not serious. Not creative. The exact way people talk about AI video right now.

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The painters who were displaced were mostly the lowest tier of the profession, travelling portraitists who were more craftsmen than artists. They were not considered artists by the art establishment of the time. They were the commodity-level producers, the people doing work that was functional rather than expressive. Photography replaced the function, not the art.

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The skilled painters? They bought cameras and used them as tools. Charles Loring Elliott, one of the most respected American portrait painters of the 1840s, owned a daguerreotype camera and used it to speed up his sittings. He didn't see a threat. He saw a better reference system.

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And the real creative revolution? It came a generation later. The Impressionists grew up in a world where photography already existed. Rather than compete with the camera for objective truth, they were freed by it. They doubled down on what a machine could not do: subjective vision, emotion, the physical act of putting paint on canvas. Monet, Renoir, Degas, they did not happen in spite of photography. They happened because of it. Photography handling the job of realism is what gave painters permission to explore everything else. Impressionism led to Post-Impressionism, which led to Cubism, which led to Surrealism, which led to Abstract Expressionism. The most celebrated art movements in human history exist because a machine took over the boring part.

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And here is the detail nobody mentions. Delaroche, the man who declared painting dead? He kept painting for another 16 years until the day he died. His other documented comments about photography were actually quite positive. He saw potential for collaboration and augmentation, not replacement. The apocalyptic quote became mythology. The reality was much more nuanced.

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And when photographers finally wanted their work to be taken seriously as art? The Pictorialist movement of the 1890s deliberately made photographs look like paintings. They had to borrow legitimacy from the very medium they were supposed to have killed.

"I think I'm extinct."

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Fast forward 150 years. It is 1993 and Steven Spielberg is making Jurassic Park. He has hired Phil Tippett, the greatest stop-motion animator alive. The man who built the AT-AT Walkers for The Empire Strikes Back. The man who animated ED-209 in RoboCop. The plan is to use go-motion, Tippett's own pioneering technique, to bring the dinosaurs to life.

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Then Dennis Muren at Industrial Light and Magic shows Spielberg a CGI test of a walking T-Rex.

Spielberg says, "That's what we're going to do."

Tippett turns to him and says, "I feel extinct."

Spielberg liked the line so much he gave it to Jeff Goldblum in the film.

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Tippett did not take it well. He has spoken openly about it. He got seriously ill with pneumonia, fell into depression, and spent two weeks in bed. His entire life's work, decades of mastering a craft, felt like it had been made irrelevant overnight. The hardworking teams of artists and technicians who had been practically creating wonderful creatures and horrific monsters for film for the past 20 years saw CGI as a direct threat to their livelihood.

But here is what happened next, and this is the part that matters.

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Spielberg called Tippett back. Not out of charity. Out of necessity. Because CGI animators in 1993 could make a dinosaur move, but they could not make it move like a real animal. Tippett understood weight, mass, muscle tension, the way a predator shifts its balance before it strikes. He had spent his entire career studying that. So Tippett and his team built the Dinosaur Input Device, a physical armature covered in sensors that let traditional stop-motion animators translate their hands-on knowledge into CG character movement.

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The result? The CGI dinosaurs in Jurassic Park breathe, flex, twitch and react like real animals. Tippett won the Academy Award for Visual Effects on the very film he thought would end his career.

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He went on to supervise Starship Troopers, the Twilight series, and dozens of other films. He eventually directed his own stop-motion feature, Mad God, in 2021. He did not become extinct. He evolved. His craft did not die. It found new expression.

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Stan Winston had a similar moment. He built the physical T-Rex for Jurassic Park, one of the most incredible practical effects in cinema history. When the film came out, everyone talked about the CGI. His son Matt has said Stan initially felt hurt that everyone seemed to ignore his work. But then he went out and bought several CGI workstations because he could see the way forward. He co-founded Digital Domain with James Cameron. His studio expanded to encompass digital effects alongside practical work. After his death in 2008, his four lead supervisors founded Legacy Effects, which has gone on to work on Avatar, the Avengers films, Pacific Rim, and continues to blend practical and digital to this day.

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As one of his colleagues put it: Stan was willing to embrace digital. You could try to compete with it, but why? We're all trying to do the same thing.

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The original Jurassic Park contains roughly six minutes of CGI dinosaurs across the entire film. Jurassic World contains over 2,000 CGI shots. And yet the industry consensus is that the best work in the franchise still comes from blending practical and digital. The technology did not replace the artists. It gave them new tools and, in many cases, made their existing skills more valuable, not less.

The pattern

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It is the same story both times. The same psychology. The same arc.

The new technology arrives and it is crude, limited, easy to mock. Early photographs were blurry and required people to sit motionless for minutes. Early CGI looked plastic and weightless. Early AI video has hands with seven fingers and text that melts.

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The establishment reacts with disdain. It is soulless. It is mechanical. It lacks human feeling. It will destroy everything we have built.

The commodity-level work gets displaced first. Travelling portraitists. Stock footage libraries. Template-driven motion graphics. The functional work, not the expressive work.

The skilled practitioners absorb the technology as a tool. Elliott used his daguerreotype camera. Tippett built the DID. Winston bought CGI workstations.

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The real creative breakthrough comes from the next generation, the people who grow up with the technology as a given and ask what it frees them to do differently. The Impressionists did not fight photography. They used the space it created to reinvent what painting could be.

And the original technology? It does not die either. Stop-motion animation is thriving. Painting has never been more alive. Practical effects are still used in virtually every major film. Legacy Effects is still building creatures by hand in 2025. The old and the new coexist because they do different things well.

What this means right now

I am not here to tell VFX artists that AI is fine, actually. I made a spec ad with AI and I publicly documented everything that is wrong with it. The consistency issues. The lack of controllability. The uncanny movement. The fact that you cannot direct it the way you direct a real production. These are real problems and I said so.

What I am saying is that the reaction of "this is slop, you are a fraud, this technology is worthless" is the same reaction painters had to photography, the same reaction stop-motion artists had to CGI, and in both cases the people who leaned in and adapted were the ones who thrived.

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The ones who had the hardest time were not the ones who lacked talent. They were the ones who could not separate their identity from their current tools. Phil Tippett nearly destroyed himself over it before he found his way through. The psychological cost of creative displacement is real and it deserves to be taken seriously, not dismissed with "just adapt."

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But the history is clear. The technology does not go backwards. The craft evolves. The artists who bring genuine skill, taste, and understanding to the new tools are the ones who define what comes next. Not because the technology is good enough on its own. It never is. But because a human being who actually understands light, movement, composition, and storytelling can do things with these tools that someone just typing prompts never will.

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That is the bet I am making. Not that AI replaces VFX. But that the VFX artists who learn to use it will be untouchable. Just like Tippett was. Just like Winston was. Just like the Impressionists were.

The Impressionism moment for AI has not happened yet. We are still in the daguerreotype phase. The part where it is ugly and crude and everyone is arguing. The real work, the work that actually matters, is still ahead. And it will be made by people who know what they are doing.

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