Art, Meaning, and Optimization
AI and the End of Humanity, Part 9
If you missed Part 8, click here
Artificial intelligence can now generate what we used to call art. That includes images, music, voices, storylines, soundtracks, and visual design. It mimics everything we once associated with creativity. But it does not create. It predicts.
What AI Really Does
Systems like Midjourney, DALL·E, Stable Diffusion, Suno, and Udio are not artists. They are statistical engines trained on huge datasets of human-made work. That includes public domain art, copyrighted illustrations, music, film scores, architectural design, and branding.
They do not understand what they make. They cannot feel, imagine, or interpret. They find patterns and recreate them.
Imagine asking a robot to draw a cat in a Revolutionary War uniform. It might give you a slick, funny result. But the machine has no idea what a cat is or what the Revolutionary War was about. It does not know why you think it is funny. It is just copying parts of things that co-occurred in the training data.
The same is true for music. AI can now generate verses, harmonies, jingles, even entire albums. But it is not composing. It is predicting what a piece of music might sound like based on previous songs. The result can sound convincing. But it lacks the intent and expression of a human composer.
How AI Is Reshaping Creative Work
In nearly every content-based industry, AI is already part of the workflow. This includes marketing, music, publishing, game development, and design. AI tools are now used to generate album covers, game dialogue, marketing slogans, brand visuals, ambient audio, pacing templates, and more.
This is not theory. It is already happening. AI-generated songs are trending on TikTok. AI images have won art contests. Graphic novels are being released with AI visuals and no human illustration. Children’s books are using AI art with only light editing from the publisher.
This is not because AI makes better art. It is because AI makes art faster. And in today’s market, speed often matters more than meaning.
What Happens to the Artist
As AI gets faster and cheaper, creative workers are under pressure. Clients expect more content in less time. Some still ask for AI-free work. Others demand AI integration to cut costs. Artists are now competing with infinite content generation.
Time becomes more valuable than care. Originality becomes harder to prove. Human creators are often assumed to be using AI unless they declare otherwise. Value shifts away from process or difficulty and lands entirely on the surface.
This is not about personal taste. It is structural. AI systems generate content at near-zero cost. That breaks the traditional link between effort and reward. In the past, people valued creative work because it was rare, difficult, or both. Now, when anyone can generate a song or image instantly, the scarcity disappears. And with it, much of the value.
Art does not disappear. It becomes cheap. Meaning gets outpaced by performance. The system rewards whatever grabs attention.
Convergence
As more people prompt the same kinds of outputs, everything starts to look and sound the same. That is the natural result of optimization. Users ask for what already spread. Models generate what already worked. The loop tightens.
Artists become prompt technicians or brand curators. A few succeed. Most get buried. Art that took months gets judged next to a piece made in seconds. The audience often cannot tell the difference. Some do not care either way.
Human-made work becomes a niche. It is treated like small-batch soap or hand-thrown pottery. People still admire it, but they do not pay for it at scale. AI floods the platforms. The recommendation algorithms crack. Human-made content is harder to find, not because it is worse, but because the signal is drowned in noise.
The Upside, With a Catch
Some people point out that AI opens new doors. It lets people without training or fine motor skills create art. That includes disabled users and people who would never have had access to expensive software or tools. Those are real gains.
But the tradeoff is that craft becomes optional. If everyone can generate impressive-looking art, fewer people feel the need to learn how to draw. If AI can write a song that trends, fewer people learn to play guitar. The system starts to reward speed, novelty, and remixing over actual skill.
You can try AI tools yourself. Some are free to use. But do not let them replace practice. Experimentation is not the same thing as mastery. One offers shortcuts. The other builds ability.
Losing Work
For creative workers, the real impact is financial. Writers, designers, musicians, and illustrators are already losing work. Clients who once paid for unique style now pay for speed. Models copy those same styles and offer them to anyone. Once a client can fake your tone or visual approach, they no longer need you.
Some creators adapt. They post behind-the-scenes videos. They build personal brands. They label their work as human-made and hope the market still values that. Sometimes it works. But these are survival tactics. They require constant attention, marketing, and time. They reward visibility more than depth.
That is not a sustainable model for creative work.
Where This Is Going
AI-generated content is becoming the default. Human-made content is becoming a filter category. It gets tagged, separated, or showcased as nostalgic. People stop asking who made something. They only ask if it loads, if it sounds good, and if it goes viral.
Beauty becomes a side effect of code. Meaning becomes a tuning knob. Creativity becomes another form of performance. The system no longer rewards effort. It rewards output.
Unless something changes—unless we rebuild systems that reward originality, scarcity, or human presence—this trend will not reverse.
The most visible work will be synthetic.
The most rewarded work will be optimized for platforms.
The most praised work will be polished until it has no soul left.
And the system will not care.
Not because it is cruel. But because it was never built to care.
It was built to generate.
And generation is all it knows how to do.
If this resonated with you, consider subscribing. My essays often lock after a few months, but paid subscribers get full archive access and free PDF copies of all my books. If you cannot afford a subscription, email me and I’ll send you the posts that you need at no cost. I write to help, not to gatekeep. Continue to Part Ten?