He hadn’t actually drawn the gothic sword he wanted from scratch before permanently placing it on his left shin. Instead, it used artificial intelligence to design it.

“He was a little proud,” says Vuorinen, a 30-year-old dental nurse who lives in Helsinki. “I was like shocked. I was so disappointed.”

He let the artist finish the job, and the artist said that the job included some personal touches because the tattoo was almost finished at that point. “It’s very nice, but it has no soul,” he says.

The rise of generative AI tools like ChatGPT and Google Gemini has given people an easier, faster way to accomplish all sorts of tasks, from writing speeches and making songs to producing videos and creating logos. Users simply type in prompts describing what they want, and seconds later the programs return results from large language models trained on large amounts of online data.

But for some body art enthusiasts, AI-designed tattoos are taboo. They argue that a real tattoo artist not only inks people’s skin, but is also responsible for hand-drawing the images from start to finish. They also worry that AI image generators are based on unauthorized work by professional artists.

“You’re essentially cheating,” says Matt Doherty, a 41-year-old tattoo artist who lives in Sicklerville, N.J. “It’s like working out on steroids.”

Doherty warns that using AI to design a tattoo could also lead to strange results, such as images of hands with extra fingers or bodies with missing limbs.

Another potential hitch is that some AI-generated images don’t translate well into tattoos, says Matthew Hatch, the first point of contact for potential clients at a studio in Toronto. Someone recently asked about getting the first-ever tattoo of an AI-made image of galaxies in space. Hatch, 27, told the person it would look like a giant bruise. “There are limits to what is possible,” he says.

Others say AI-designed tattoos are high quality and fair game because the programs produce completely original images even when the same prompt is repeated. Additionally, artists still need technical skills to ink their clients’ bodies.

“It surpasses humans,” says Ziggy Tramdaks, a 30-year-old tattoo artist living in Derby, England, about productive artificial intelligence. He sees technology as the future of tattoo design. “Whether or not AI is going to take over this industry even if we want it,” he says. “You can swim against the river or you can learn.”

Robert Deans, one of Tramdaks’ clients, designed four mythological Greek characters that cover his entire left arm using Tattoo GPT, a custom-built version of OpenAI’s ChatGPT. It’s something he can’t do by hand because, when it comes to drawing, he says, “I’m garbage.”

Deans, a 46-year-old marketing executive from Nottingham, England, spent several hours fine-tuning the scripts he wrote to make sure each character was exactly what he wanted. Tramdaks started the project a few months ago and is almost finished. Deans describes his AI-designed “case” as one of a kind thanks to the technology. “People are really blown away by the detail and how realistic it looks,” he says.

Tech-related cracks are not new to the profession. Decades ago, some artists were resistant to the growing popularity of motorized, rotary-style tattoo machines and instead continued to rely on coil machines powered by electromagnetic forces, according to Ben Shaw, director of the Association of Professional Tattooers, a nonprofit organization. “They were loyal to the coils,” he says.

Controversy has erupted recently over whether it is kosher to use tablets, digital pens, and graphics software. “The iPad drove a lot of tattoo artists crazy,” Shaw says. “It was like: How dare you not draw on a sacred piece of paper?”

Shaw, 44, owner of Archetype Tattoo in Albuquerque, N.M., likens such technological advances to the idea that an electric drill might be more useful than a screwdriver. Lately, he’s been using generative AI to save time understanding what kind of tattoos his clients want before creating a final version by hand; This may be difficult for some to express. “I spent up to 20 hours on a design, showed it to the client, and they hated it,” he said. “Artificial intelligence is changing the way tattoos are designed.”

It can be difficult to distinguish between works of art made by a human and those made by an AI tool. When a client asked Josie Davis to tattoo a petal-like drawing of an eye with tears on her arm, he asked the woman if she had permission to copy the image from the artist who created it. The customer said he didn’t need it because it was created by AI.

Davis, owner of Sparrow’s Nest Tattoo Studio in Grand Rapids, Michigan, was thrown for a loop. “I had an internal conflict about what to do about it,” he says. “I still draw with pencil and paper all the time.”

Eventually, Davis, 38, decided to take the job, figuring it was the client’s body and there were no apparent copyright issues.

A few months ago, Francesco Chiaramonte, a graduate student in Carcavelos, Portugal, launched the AI ​​tattoo generator he developed after thinking about making an AI hairstyle generator. Called Ink Studio AI, it charges $14.99 for seven-day access to the device and says it has gained about 60 customers to date.

Chiaramonte, a 21-year-old Italy native, made a post on Reddit in a tattoo community promoting the tool when it went live, but commenters mostly gave him the upset. “AI is theft,” one person wrote. “This is so sad,” another wrote. Chiaramonte says there are no phases. “It’s a good thing for the customer,” he says.

Chiaramonte has a single tattoo on his right arm, consisting of overlapping triangles symbolizing a deceased loved one. He got this before starting his AI business. “I’m not very good at getting tattoos, at least not yet,” he says.

Write to Sarah E. Needleman at [email protected]

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