How many AI artists are there now?
Nobody counts AI artists, and no credible number exists. What's actually measured is tool users: Midjourney reported roughly 15 million registered accounts but only 1.5–2.5 million active, and Stable Diffusion 10 million-plus across all channels (Everypixel, August 2023). Tens of millions have made an AI image; the number who'd call themselves artists is far smaller and unmeasured.
Why — the first-principles explanation
The question has no answer because the category has no edge. To count AI artists you'd first have to decide who qualifies, and every possible line is arbitrary. Is someone who typed one prompt into a free app an AI artist? Someone who sells prints? Someone who trains custom models and spends forty hours on a single piece? Each definition changes the count by orders of magnitude. Statisticians can only count things with boundaries, and this one doesn't have one.
What is countable is usage, and here the numbers get slippery for a second reason: most AI image generation is untrackable by design. Everypixel estimated that about 80% of AI images — roughly 12.59 billion of 15 billion — came from Stable Diffusion, which is open source. Anyone can download it and run it on their own graphics card, offline, forever, with no account and no telemetry. The most-used tool in the category is the one that reports nothing.
Third, the gap between registered and active is enormous, and this is where most viral statistics go wrong. Everypixel put Midjourney at about 15 million registered accounts but only 1.5–2.5 million active members — roughly a 6-to-1 ratio between people who signed up and people who actually use it. Any article citing the big number as "AI artists" has inflated the real figure by about six times, before you even get to the question of whether trying a tool makes you an artist.
So the honest shape of the answer: tens of millions of people have generated an AI image. A few million use these tools with any regularity. The subset who work at it seriously, build a body of work, and identify as artists is almost certainly in the low hundreds of thousands or less — and that last figure is an inference, not a measurement. Anyone quoting a precise count of AI artists made it up or laundered a tool-signup number.
An example that makes it click
Ask "how many photographers are there?" Almost everyone on earth owns a camera and has taken a picture. Does that make five billion photographers? Obviously not — but where's the line? People who own a real camera? People who get paid? People who'd say "I'm a photographer" at a party? Each answer gives a wildly different number, and none is wrong.
AI art is at the same awkward stage, except younger and messier. The tools counted signups, not artists — and for every ten people who signed up for Midjourney, roughly eight or nine never really came back. Counting the signups and calling them artists is like counting phone owners and calling them photographers.
Key facts
- Midjourney had roughly 15 million registered users but only about 1.5–2.5 million active members, a roughly 6:1 signup-to-active gap (Everypixel Journal, data as of August 15, 2023).
- Stable Diffusion had 10+ million users across all channels and accounted for an estimated 12.59 billion images — about 80% of all AI images — but being open source, its true usage cannot be tracked (Everypixel, August 2023).
- More than 15 billion AI images were created from 2022 to August 2023, averaging about 34 million per day.
- Everypixel's estimates were extrapolated from partial data, and the authors explicitly stated that accurate AI image statistics remain a challenge and go out of date daily; the page was last updated August 15, 2023.
- No government statistical agency, census, or peer-reviewed study currently publishes a count of people who identify as AI artists.
▶ The 60-second explainer (script)
How many AI artists are there? Honest answer: nobody knows, and any specific number you've seen is fake. Here's why. First, the category has no edge. To count AI artists you'd have to decide who counts. Is it someone who typed one prompt into a free app? Someone who sells prints? Someone who trains custom models and spends forty hours on a piece? Each line changes the number by a factor of a hundred. Second — and this is the big one — most AI image generation is untrackable on purpose. About eighty percent of AI images come from Stable Diffusion, which is open source. You download it, run it on your own graphics card, offline, no account, no telemetry. The most popular tool in the entire category reports nothing to anyone. Third, the gap between signed up and actually uses it is huge. Midjourney had around fifteen million registered accounts — but only one and a half to two and a half million active. That's roughly six to one. So when an article says fifteen million AI artists, they took a signup number and inflated the real thing about sixfold. The honest shape: tens of millions have made an AI image. A few million use these tools regularly. The number who seriously identify as artists is much smaller — and genuinely uncounted.
What authoritative sources say
People also ask
Where do the numbers like '15 million AI artists' come from?
Almost always from Midjourney's registered-account figure, which Everypixel paired with an active-user count of only 1.5–2.5 million. The headline number counts signups, not artists.
Are the Everypixel statistics reliable?
They're the most-cited estimates and were carefully built, but they're extrapolations from partial data and were last updated in August 2023. Treat them as an order of magnitude, not a measurement.
Why can't the companies just tell us?
The dominant tool is open source. Once someone downloads Stable Diffusion and runs it locally, no company sees the usage at all — and that's the majority of generation.
Is the number growing?
Almost certainly, since image generation is now built into free chat apps and phones. But that also blurs the category further: someone who makes a birthday card in a chatbot isn't obviously an artist.
Are there fewer human artists because of this?
That's a separate, contested question about employment, and the AI-artist count doesn't answer it. Tool adoption numbers say nothing about jobs gained or lost.