by our own hand or none

25 May, 2025

I recently saw a tech person make the prediction that, as the result of generative AI, we will eventually live in a world where "the craft of physical performance is superseded by a new craft of raw ideation." This particular concept of 'the idea is what matters and craft is merely a way of expressing that idea' is fairly common among those who do not either create or engage critically with art--as if the thing that made Star Wars such a phenomenal success back in the 70s was the idea of wizards in space being just that good--but what struck me is that this whole conversation was full of people who were mostly on board with the idea of "I like generative AI because it means I get more cool pictures to look at!" and, like. What is the fucking point?¹

Corporations have been trying to dehumanize art for decades now--this is nothing new. A great deal of time and effort has been spent trying to encourage people to think of art not as participating in the great conversation that dates back to the earliest days of humankind, but as a product to be consumed, and discarded, and endlessly repackaged and sold back to us. In that respect, generative AI is not so much a new phenomenon as it is a logical extension of what corporate-owned media has already done to our ability to engage with art: it is the desire to just have a machine that will spit out a product you will enjoy, and then discard, over and over again, forever. What if instead of having to wait for yet another anodyne Marvel movie you could just have it, whenever you wanted? But this is such a fundamentally empty way to engage with art; if this is the future, I want no part of it.

I engage with art because I want to understand. I want to understand how other people see the world; I want to feel the way the artist feels. And I engage with art because I want to see the different ways artists work their craft: Sean Baker's cinema vérité stylings in Take Out, Kurosawa's theatrical blocking in High and Low, the way blackle mori manages to make a compelling noir short story in a Bluesky thread that started as a shitpost. I seek out new art because every now and then I see or read or watch or play something that makes me sit back and think "Holy shit." All of this is interesting, is possible, because of the person behind the work, because of the choices the artist made, or didn't make, because of the interplay between collaborators. AI does not make choices. It does not have the capacity for intention.

The act of creation is fundamentally an act of putting a piece of yourself on display: art is by necessity a reflection of the artist. No matter how much effort someone puts into their AI prompts, the result will not share that inextricable connection to the artist. Oh, I'm certain there are "prompt engineers"² out there who are very proud of their "creations", but there's nothing of themselves in the product. There's no room to inflect, to play, to add that personal touch to the resulting art. There's no way to read a poem an LLM produced and feel like you have, for an instant, shared in an experience with the poet. There is no poet to connect with.

I am not arguing that there is magical spark that an AI is simply not capable of replicating, some "ah, I will always be able to tell." What I am arguing is this: art is conversation. I am saying that if I am given the choice between talking to a real person, or talking to a machine designed to emulate a real person, I will choose the real person every time. And what these AI enthusiasts are excited about is a world where we replace all of the real people with machines designed to emulate them--that is what I mean by soulless. I mean a world where we are stripping away human connections, because it's much easier to commodify everything that we hold dear and sell it to us at a premium if we do that. Because the best way to take power away from people is to isolate them, to deny them human connections. Because heaven is each other.

I know can't do much to stop these people from dreaming of an empty, soulless world, bereft of human connection, bereft of art with meaning, art that challenges, art that declares and questions and dreams. But I can promise you this: I'm not going anywhere. Art isn't going anywhere. I will keep making stories and essays. I will keep engaging with art crafted by human hands. And no matter how much soulless slop they try to churn out and feed to us there will still be so much wonder in this world that you can spend a lifetime seeking it out and never run out and never get bored.

#essay