PROMPT OR PAINTBRUSH: WHAT WILL YOU CHOOSE?

July 20, 2026 31 2

Maruné Nel

@muisnel14

Somewhere on campus, a graphic design student is three energy drinks deep, staring down a deadline, and one text prompt away from a finished mood board. Somewhere else, a purist is clutching their tablet pen like it personally offended them just by existing. Welcome to 2026, where “did you actually make that yourself” has quietly become one of the most loaded questions you can ask an artist.

Unfortunately, nobody warned us whilst growing up that the robots wouldn’t go for the boring jobs first. They are infiltrating the fun ones. And they didn’t even sneak in through the back door.

The FAK (Federasie van Afrikaanse Kultuurverenigings), an organisation that has spent decades being the self-appointed guardian of Afrikaans arts and culture, basically rolled out the red carpet for it. This year’s Skryf’it song writing competition added a brand-new category built entirely around AI in music. Yes, an entire category, with its own spotlight.

Barry Müller, the FAK’s national head of community, history and ad hoc projects, isn’t pretending it’s a small thing either. Technology, according to him, is moving fast, and AI increasingly shapes how music gets made. Rather than fight it, the FAK decided to lean in and handle it responsibly instead.

“The question is not whether AI will replace artists,” Müller says. “It’s how technology can be used responsibly without losing the soul of Afrikaans music.” It is also, conveniently, the exact motto every creative industry on earth is currently trying to convince itself of.

While the FAK is blatantly letting AI into their spaces, graphic design has been quietly having the same identity crisis for years, just with less mentorship and considerably more existential dread. Adobe Firefly, Canva’s Magic Studio: type a sentence, get a logo. The R50 Fiverr logo gig, a punchline for years but somebody’s rent money, is basically gone. Clients are now turning to these AI models as a cheaper alternative than human design and labour.

But designers aren’t actually disappearing. Industry data from earlier this year shows businesses holding their design budgets steady, some even growing them. Creativity is still sitting at number one on the list of things companies say they’re hiring for. Since AI has absolutely no idea what to do when a client says “make it pop” with another type of enthusiasm that’s completely different from the client before.

So, what does this actually look like from inside North West University (NWU) Potchefstroom, where students are meant to graduate into the unknown of whatever this industry turns into next?

“We live in a world that wants everything done right now,” says Eldré Jonker, a graduate and alumnus with a degree in BA Graphic Design with Illustration and Art History at NWU’s Potchefstroom Campus. “Nobody who actually values the sensitivity and importance of art wants to wait hours, days or weeks for a piece when they can get something from AI in seconds, and on top of that, they still feel good about it because they did it ‘themselves’.”

Across campus art spaces, the same tension keeps surfacing: how do you actually teach or protect a craft that people are being handed a shortcut to every single day? Eldandri Olwage, Marketing Manager at NWU Thalia Toneel, sees both. “AI is a tool and a threat in the arts, because it takes opportunities away from people who actually have talent and replaces it with something impersonal,” she says. “There is one thing it can’t replace, though, and that’s the emotion people feel.” She emphasises that she doesn’t think we should take that away by replacing everything with AI, because art exists for people, to make people feel something.

Thalia performing live (Source: Elandri Olwage).

Then there’s the dilemma of individuality, which nobody really addresses. If a prompt can spit out a thousand versions of the same idea before your coffee even goes cold, what does “your own work” mean anymore? Some students have made peace with it, using AI the way you’d use a rough first draft: get something down, then actually make the decisions that matter. Others are far less convinced and treat the whole thing with the kind of suspicion usually reserved for a group project member who “will definitely still do their part”.

For Jonker, it’s less a grey area and more of a straightforward problem. “AI robs art of its depth and the process of conceptualisation,” she says. “It can be used as a tool, but only if it’s used the right way, typically in the planning phase, not in conceptualisation or production.” She believes students also need to be shown how leaning on AI as the answer to everything quietly weakens their own thinking in the process.

Still, she isn’t writing off the future entirely. “Art isn’t going to die out,” she says. “AI can keep advancing, get smarter, and create better ideas and products because of that, but it will never replace the human side of art. People are already starting to crave more things made by humans and want to boycott AI.”

Is AI the printing press of this generation’s creative industries, or just another overhyped gimmick everyone will stop using once the novelty wears off? Ask again in five years. For now, from Afrikaans songwriting stages to design labs in Potchefstroom, the robots have officially been let in the door. Whether we welcome it with open arms or shut the door in its face is, for once, still entirely up to us.