The Shirt Board has argued about AI art since October 2022. I went back through every thread on it, including two new ones from October 2026. Here’s the rundown. Read in order, they tell a clearer story than any single post does. TBT Four Years of AI Art Talk on The Shirt Board

2022: Can you replace your artists?

The first thread was a tutorial. zanegun08 posted Is it Time to Replace Your Artists with Artificial Intelligence? in the Art/Separation Tutes board. He generated a jack-o’-lantern in Midjourney. Then he took it into Photoshop to colorize and halftone it, and into Illustrator for text. The result was a two-color halftone design ready for discharge. He also named the problem that still comes up today: “getting something without hard edges can be challenging.”

rusty’s reply set the tone for the shop side. He called DALL-E “a more customizable version of clipart.” His caveat: “you’ll need a skilled artist to make something amazing out of it.”

2023: Prompt craft

By February 2023 the forum had a Midjourney thread and a Discord channel. Pierre at blue moon shared the prompt fix that produced usable art. “specify VECTOR and One Color (I usually tell it white on black). It changes things significantly. Also add Round Background.” farmboygraphics coined the job title: “Instead of Artist, the new term will be Prompt Crafter.”

I covered the same learning curve in Fahrenheit AI Episode 1, Episode 2, and 30 Days Rubbernecking AI Generators. The forum reached the same conclusions on its own.

2024: Production reality

In Artist skills being taken out?, the conversation moved from novelty to workflow. Dottonedan posted the resolution math. Generate at “around 38″ wide at 72 ppi,” reduce it to a 12″ print, and you land near 300 ppi. He also ran 48 versions of a bass and never got the lure hooked in its mouth. He drew it in himself.

Atownsend put about four hours into one trail-runner design. After generation came “layer masks, adjusting blending options between the layers, adding filters, and prepping the art for separation.” In Straight outta Dall-e he described a 300-piece run. DALL-E gave him “a large 72 dpi image riddled with spelling mistakes.” Then came “about 6 hours of post Dall E processing and 2-3 hours in the color sep.”

GraphicDisorder raised the other concern. AI output “has a ‘look’ to it,” and customers notice. “AI is great but not if it ends up with us all having the same type of art.” I wrote about that same sameness problem in TBT: AI Generative Art, 18 Months Later.

2026: The customers bring it

This year the thread title changed. It’s no longer “should we use it.” It’s How is everyone handling AI submitted artwork? Homer opened it. His shop gets “at least 3-4 designs a day of AI created ‘art'” and the customers “usually want adjustments.” GraphicDisorder followed. Most “aren’t ready to print, either too small, or need some type of work.” His shop turns that into “Hundreds of dollars of art.”

The fixes are consistent across the thread. ChatGPT for background removal. Photoshop Generative Upscale for cleanup. Canva tools, then vectorizer.ai. Or a vector redraw sent out. 1964GN covered the business side. “We are very upfront with our customers on what quality is acceptable, and what is not, and what the cost will be.” Then, “Either way, art fees are added.”

3Deep drew the line that matters most for this blog. AI art works for his DTF customers. For screen printing, “I still have to rework it for printing.”

Frog connected it to history. Nine out of ten Canva submissions “did not know about resolution or size needed for shirts.” It reminded him of bootleg Photoshop 4 and 72 dpi files. “We called them ‘Digital da Vincis.'” That is the same fix I walk through in °FAI: AI Image Resolution Upscaling for Print and FFF: Working from customer photos of old prints.

New since July

Two October 2026 threads extend the story. In Is DTF hurting your shop?, Homer tied the two together. “Between AI ‘art’ and DTF, the cost of entry into this industry is under 100.00.” whitewater said his shop put DTF in house, “had to with all the AI art we get.” And in AI in daily tasks, mk162 and Homer moved past art entirely. They use AI for quotes, embroidery name typesetting, and rebuilding packing labels from Order My Gear PDFs. That is the direction I described in °FAI: AI Pipeline for a Screen Print Factory.

What it adds up to

Four years in, the forum agrees on three things. First, AI art arrives at 72 dpi with hard edges, text errors, and no printable color count. Second, fixing it takes a production artist, and the fix gets billed. Third, the shops that treat the fix as a service instead of a nuisance are making money on it.