The symbolism of Celtic knotwork, or interlace, is traditionally explained as the woven path of life, love and faith. This “Celtic design,” created by AI, is a “disaster by the standards of both traditional symbolism and the design heritage,” Stephen Walker says. “The rendering shows numerous errors in over-under interlace integrity as well as a total lack of continuity of the path of the knotwork.”
ANDOVER — Artificial Intelligence, or AI, has crashed the Irish Festival — drunk, pushy and getting in everyone’s face with some of the most obnoxious and un-authentic Celtic art of all time.
We wouldn’t expect a very high standard of authenticity for the kitsch in the run-up to Saint Patrick’s Day, but there are some people using it who should know better. Alongside the green plastic bowler hats and shamrock Mardis Gras beads, in 2025 the t-shirt graphics have hit a new low in tone-deaf cultural illiteracy.
The really sad thing is how many festivals, magazines, cultural organizations and others who have responsibility for our heritage have been settling for the same appallingly low standard of clip-art and AI-generated tangles of spaghetti passing for Celtic interlace.
Celtic art scholar and Irish presidential candidate Donnacha MacGabhann of County Limerick, says, “I share the concern about what happens when AI ultimately gets better at it. I can’t imagine AI being programmed to replicate the quality of work in the ‘Book of Kells.’”
The International Day of Celtic Art was Sunday. Contemporary Celtic artists and their supporters focused this year on raising awareness of what makes Celtic art good and authentic. The day was declared by contemporary Celtic artists and craftsmen to celebrate this ancient art form and to encourage growth and the continuation of the “Celtic Renaissance,” which has been gathering momentum since the end of the 20th century.
The emergence of artificial intelligence is causing a crisis for many contemporary Celtic artists. AI is not especially good at producing Celtic art — yet — but because it is fast and cheap it is being used more and more frequently to supply designs and illustrations for Celtic-themed projects. What AI is producing is frequently very attractive, but it fails miserably to follow the traditional norms of Celtic design.
That’s not to say that it has taken computers to screw up this venerable art form. Regular humans have been getting Celtic art wrong for centuries.
Historically poor Celtic design is often a result of not knowing or not caring how it is supposed to be done as long as it suggests the interlace, spirals and geometric patterns of the ancient art. AI will create very attractive images but when asked to create Celtic designs the results are a mish-mash, consistently even further from that of uninformed human artists.
“As someone who has to work with AI a great deal, I’m very concerned about it — not about what it can or can’t do today/tomorrow, but more long-term ramifications in generational knowledge and skills lost,” said Michael Stone, network/systems administrator at Alfred University. “It may be adept, but it is soulless. As human beings, we’d be wise to not relinquish our souls so readily.”
California-based tattoo artist Pat Fish concurs by saying, “I was raised with the admonition, ‘Don’t look for what you don’t want to see,’ but I can’t help it, there I am muttering the over-under-over incantation.
“The worst are the items on Temu — truly tragic,” she continued. “Or the people who proudly send me photos of tattoo installations they have had done locally after purchasing my patterns online, where I can see the point where the stencil blurred and the tattooist started to ad lib the knots. (Stephen’s) visual of the pushy drunk AI image purveyor is apt, and he’ll sell his t-shirts to the credulous crowd.
“For those of us stuck in the catechism of the tradition, we can only be responsible for our own work.”
Fish is one of many Celtic artists who have spent a lifetime mastering this ancient idiom only to see a flood of AI images overwhelm the internet with unauthentic imitations. My fear, which is shared by many of my Celtic art colleagues, is that the cheapening of our style will devalue the entire genre.
As an old man shaking my fist at the cloud, I don’t know if I can make any difference.
(Stephen Walker is a jewelry artist working in the Celtic tradition. His business, Walker Metalsmiths is on Main Street in the village of Andover.)
