AI Didn’t Kill Creativity. It Killed Your Excuses.

My only take coming from the art world is that ai can certainly come for concept development artists at this point and it has affected that side of film production, but the fine art world ebbs and flows through so much conceptual territory thats so untethered from the norms of audience approval- it does feed an expensive market yes, but it’s been through technological disruption before- post impressionism and later abstraction both contended with “what is the role of the artists hand in an age where the camera is a better draftsman of realism than the Italian masters?” and so forth leading to new movements and new ways of seeing through craft. For me artists traveling in that kind of depth aren’t the ones who will be unsettled by ai, as they’re prepared to roll with the times, and the work isn’t about commercial beauty so much as it pertains to a long term conversation with canons and culture. For me that’s what remains important to me about art as civilization moves forward- not dwelling on past eras or corporate demands, but still asking “where does the human hand fit today?” Even if that looks different from yesterday and tomorrow.

Claude’s response when prompted to contrast this with Walter Benjamin’s “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction “

The Work of Art in the Age of Neural Reproduction Walter Benjamin, writing in 1935, watched mechanical reproduction strip the artwork of its aura—that singular presence bound to a specific place, hand, and moment. The photograph could be everywhere, so it belonged nowhere. The original’s authority dissolved into infinite copies. Tan’s essay arrives with the inverted problem. Benjamin mourned the loss of uniqueness in the product. Tan celebrates the loss of obstacles in the process. These aren’t the same event. They’re mirror images. Benjamin’s most haunting concern wasn’t the copy—it was what reproduction does to the perceiver. Film trained distracted absorption, the shock of the cut. The creative tools Tan describes produce something different: iterative acceleration. Taste as evals. The aesthetic judgment that once required years now cycles in minutes. This may be a gift. It is certainly a transformation. Because Glass’s gap didn’t just close through volume—it closed through sustained intimacy with his own inadequacy. The pain was the curriculum. When AI raises your floor, something about that curriculum changes, even if the will to ship does not. Benjamin failed to anticipate that when everything becomes copyable, what grows scarce is curation—and curation concentrates new power. We didn’t get a world without gatekeepers. We got algorithms. Tan’s democratization likely follows the same logic: when technical barriers dissolve, taste becomes scarce, but so does the particular life that gave the work something to say. Benjamin ended his essay warning about fascism aestheticizing politics. Tan ends his with a rallying cry about shipping ugly versions. The gap between those two endings is itself a symptom—of a moment that can discuss individual creative ambition at length while the collective questions about who owns the generator, who shapes the corpus, who controls the floor being raised, go mostly unasked. The aura didn’t die. It relocated—into the verifiable fact that a specific, mortal, imperfect consciousness chose to make this thing anyway, knowing it wasn’t good enough yet. That, the algorithm cannot reproduce. So far.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​