The Automation of Art

Intro

Artificial intelligence has entered nearly every corner of life. We use it for emails, translations, scheduling, debugging code and every kind of task. It’s efficient, it’s helpful, it saves us time.

But something feels profoundly wrong when AI begins to create "art". Songs, illustrations, stories, entire aesthetics generated with a prompt (e.g. Gemini Storybook).

People call it progress.
I hesitate.
I disagree.
I feel a knot tighten in my chest every time I see it.
I hate it.

This feeling hit me again recently, standing in the subway, watching yet another advertisement entirely created with AI. Perfect visuals, perfect symmetry, perfect marketing. I felt a pang of disbelief and anger.

Is this what we have come to value? Efficiency over human expression? Speed over soul?

Why does this bother me so much? Because what makes us human is not efficiency.

It’s creativity.

And now, for the first time, I feel a real, visceral conflict: part of me marvels at the technology, while the other recoils, almost in horror, at what it might be taking from us.

Why?

Automation has always had a clear purpose: to relieve humans from laborous and monotonous work, exhausting work, dangerous work. Machines were designed to free us, give us time. Time to allow us to think, to feel, to create.

And now, we are letting machines take the one thing that was meant to remain ours: Art. Imagination. Expression.

I ask myself: when we outsource our creativity, what becomes of us? When no hand trembles over the brush, no heart struggles with the notes, no soul expresses itself with words, are we still human in that act? Or are we spectators, applauding and admiring our own replacement?

This conflict gnaws at me, haunts me. I can see the potential of AI, the dreams of efficiency and perfection, the promise of instant results. But at what cost? The thing I cherish most, my humanity, is entangled and linked in the very act of creation. And watching it being simulated, commodified, optimized… it feels like a theft.

Value

Art is not about output. It’s not about quantity, speed, or perfection. Art is messy. It’s imperfect. It’s human. It comes from experience, from trial and error, from failure, from doubt, from joy, from grief.

A generated painting might look beautiful. An AI-composed song might sound impressive. But are they alive? Do they carry the fingerprint of a human who struggled, who doubted, who risked failure in order to reach something only they could have made?

When we allow machines to generate art, we risk confusing imitation for expression. We risk measuring life by the ease of its reproduction. We risk forgetting that the value of art is in the struggle, the process, the story behind it.

I find myself asking, repeatedly, bitterly: if creation can be manufactured, what remains of our experience? What meaning survives when the act of making is no longer ours?

The Balance

I am not against AI in all forms. Far from it. It can liberate us. It can remove friction, simplify the tedious, give us room for what truly matters.

But here is the line:

It should free us to create, not free us from creating.

Let AI do the labor.
Let humans do the art.

Otherwise we are outsourcing something that defines us, something that is inherently messy, flawed, precious and irreproducible.

And I cannot let myself forget that. Every time I see a perfectly generated ad or an algorithmically composed song, I feel the urgency of this truth pressing in: creativity is ours, not theirs.

Concluding Thoughts

This is not an anti-technology manifesto. It is a meditation. A warning. A personal reckoning.

In a world obsessed with productivity, speed and optimization, we risk forgetting that not everything worth doing can (or should) be automated.

Art exists because we exist.
Because we experience, because we struggle, because we live.

It is not about perfection, polish, or efficiency. It is about being human.

And that is something no machine can replace.
No machine. Not now. Not ever.