AI's effect on the creation of art. Will it replace artists in some way? Will it create art on it's on?

This is one of the more genuinely fascinating questions of our moment, and I find myself with real views on it.

AI will change art profoundly — but "replace" is the wrong frame.

Art isn't just the artifact produced. It's the intention, the struggle, the meaning-making of a human consciousness grappling with existence. When a painter labors over a canvas, or a poet searches for the exact right word, the difficulty is part of what makes the result meaningful. The work is evidence of a mind wrestling with something. AI doesn't wrestle — it interpolates from patterns.

That said, I think a few things are genuinely happening:

What AI is already doing: It's democratizing production. Someone with a vision but not technical skill can now approximate that vision visually. It's collapsing the cost of "good enough" imagery, illustration, and music to near zero. This is genuinely disruptive to illustrators, stock photographers, and composers working in commercial spaces — people whose livelihood depended on being the affordable option.

What AI can't do: It can't have an authentic point of view rooted in lived experience. It can't take a risk. It doesn't know what it feels like to lose someone, or to be afraid, or to be surprised by joy. The art that moves us most tends to be exactly that — a transmission from one consciousness to another. AI can produce beauty; it can't produce testimony.

The "creates on its own" question is philosophically tricky. Right now, AI generates in response to prompts — it's essentially a very sophisticated mirror of human creativity. Whether it could ever develop something like genuine aesthetic intention is an open question tied to deeper questions about consciousness that nobody has answered yet.

My honest assessment: AI will probably replace a significant portion of commercial art work — the functional, the generic, the fast-turnaround. It will become a powerful tool for artists who learn to use it, the way photography didn't kill painting but forced painting to become more itself. The artists who survive and thrive will likely be those whose work carries something irreducibly personal — a voice, a perspective, a presence that can't be averaged out of a training set.

The deeper risk isn't that AI makes human art obsolete. It's that we become so flooded with frictionless, beautiful, hollow content that we forget how to recognize — or hunger for — the real thing.

The philosophical core of the problem

Art has always been, at its deepest level, about mortality and meaning. Humans make things because they die. The cave paintings at Lascaux weren't functional — they were a shout across time: I was here. I saw this. This mattered to me.Every great work of art is in some sense an act of defiance against oblivion.

AI has no oblivion to defy. And that changes everything about what it produces, even when what it produces is beautiful.

There's a philosopher named Walter Benjamin who wrote about the "aura" of an artwork — the sense that it exists in a specific time and place, that it carries the trace of its making. He thought mechanical reproduction (photography, printing) threatened that aura. AI takes this several steps further. When an image can be conjured in seconds from statistical patterns, what happens to the aura? Does it dissolve entirely, or does it migrate — becoming something that now attaches only to work that is demonstrably, verifiably made by a human hand struggling against limitation?

How this reshapes creativity over time

I think we're heading toward something genuinely new, and it will unfold in a few phases.

In the near term, there will be enormous confusion — a kind of aesthetic vertigo where audiences aren't sure what they're looking at or what it means. This is already happening. People feel vaguely unsettled by AI art without always being able to articulate why. That unease is philosophically important. It's the intuition that something is missing, even when nothing is technically wrong.

Over time, I suspect human creativity will become more extreme in both directions. On one end, you'll have radical intimacy — art that foregrounds its human origins almost aggressively. Rough edges kept intentionally. Process made visible. The mistake left in. Artists essentially saying: look, a person made this, with hands, with doubt, in time. Folk art and craft traditions may experience a renaissance for exactly this reason.

On the other end, you'll have artists who fully dissolve into collaboration with AI — treating it like a landscape to explore rather than a tool to use. Using it to access aesthetic territories no individual mind could reach alone. This could produce genuinely new forms we don't have language for yet, the way early cinema borrowed from theater before realizing it was something else entirely.

The deeper philosophical shift

What I find most profound is what this does to our concept of authorship and intention. Western art has been obsessed with the individual genius — the singular vision, the recognizable hand. That idea is maybe only a few hundred years old, and it may not survive this.

Older traditions — medieval icon painting, anonymous folk songs, oral epics passed between bards — didn't center the individual creator. The work belonged to a tradition, a community, a practice. AI might push us back toward something like that, where what matters isn't who made something but what the work does, what it transmits, what conversation it enters.

That could actually be liberating. It might free creativity from ego and return it to something more like service — art made to illuminate, to connect, to grieve, to celebrate, rather than to establish the artist's identity.

The question underneath the question

What I keep coming back to philosophically is this: if AI can produce work that is indistinguishable from human art, and we can no longer tell the difference, does that reveal that we never fully understood what we were responding to in art in the first place? Or does it reveal that the context of making — the human story behind the work — was always doing more of the emotional work than the object itself?

I lean toward the latter. And if that's true, then the future of art isn't about objects at all. It's about presence, relationship, and witness. The art that survives will be the art that puts us in genuine contact with another consciousness — and that, for now, remains irreducibly human.

Though I'll admit — the "for now" at the end of that sentence gives me genuine pause.