It is getting harder to distinguished AI-generated content from the other kind, but I can still do it. At least, I think I can.

Is this the end? What is the point in writing, painting, or making music when 300 works of comparable quality can be auto-generated as you’re deciding how to get started? Are “the humanities” suddenly poorly named?

It depends on what you think “the humanities” are. Certainly the time is coming (perhaps this year, the next at the latest) when there will be no easy way to tell whether most run-of-the-mill works of art (and I use the term in its broadest capacity) were created by the direct effort of another human being. By ’26 or ’27 this may be true for genuinely good works.

So what? So there’s more competition. Overwhelmingly more competition. That has been the case already for at least twenty years.

From the perspective of the consumer, it’s over: there is no longer any need for humans to create art. Hasn’t been for a long time. Blame YouTube or GeoCities if you want, but pre-Internet telecommunications are really at fault. The moment millions of viewers could tune in to the same show and see the same thing, the die was cast.

So far, the good news is that there is no censorship. I can still type this blog and display it so that others may read it. The trick is, you’re going to have to physically click a link or type in the URL to reach the darn thing, and that is just not how people view media anymore, is it?

AI is accelerating the obsolescence of human creatives — again, speaking only from the perspective of the consumer. But had the Internet – even the computer – never come to exist, there would already have been too much competition. One truckload of gravel is enough to bury you. The next hundred trucks are irrelevant.

From the perspective of the creator, though, art is just getting started. We can read past masters as much or as a little as we like. We can be as plugged in or off the grid as suits our fancy. The real point of art – take it from somebody who has been doing this compulsively for decades – is to experience the creative process. When you make something, you explore the corners of your invisible, unmonetizeable, unconsumable mind, and whether a computer can duplicate the feat or not, YOU cannot experience it unless YOU live it.