This is the first in a series of reflections on art, technology and what remains irreducibly human in the creative act.

Lately, everyone seems to be talking about AI-generated art. It writes novels, paints portraits and composes music (sometimes with suspicious efficiency, and always faster than most of us can find a decent pencil). The debate oscillates between fascination and existential panic. ‘Will AI replace the artist?’ we ask, as though artistry were an industrial profession and the robots had finally filed for membership in the creative guild.

Yet what intrigues me most is not what AI can do, but what our anxiety reveals about ourselves. We seem to have come to think of artistry primarily in terms of production: of outputs, deliverables, artefacts and impact factors. The artist has become, rather unwittingly, a producer of cultural goods.

But artistry – at least the kind that keeps me awake at night – was never solely about production. It is also a path: a transformative movement in which the maker changes through the act of making. The process matters not because it leads to a product, but because it alters the one who undertakes it. Art, in this sense, is less a transaction than a transmutation.

Of course, I do not mean to pit transformation against production as though they were mutually exclusive. Every act of creation produces something – even if that something is invisible, a shift in perception, a deepened form of attention, a brief encounter with the ineffable. Many artists work on commission, to deadline, within constraints. But even there, something happens in the making that cannot be captured by the made object alone. It is precisely this inner, unmeasurable ‘something’ that AI cannot emulate. It can produce, yes (quite impressively so) but it cannot become.

None of this is to diminish what AI achieves. The technical sophistication is remarkable, and the outputs can be genuinely beautiful, useful, even moving. AI-generated ‘art’ (we may need to think of another terminology, but I will dwell on that later) can comfort, provoke and communicate: functions we associate with art. The distinction I’m drawing is not about quality of output, but about the nature of the process and what it does to the maker.

The point of my argumentation is not to gatekeep who counts as an ‘artist’, but to name something that risks disappearing entirely when we outsource creation to systems that cannot experience their own becoming. Nor am I suggesting artists should reject AI tools, or that using them makes one less of an artist. Many traditional tools – from the camera obscura to Photoshop – were once feared as shortcuts that would degrade art. It is, in my opinion, entirely up to the artists themselves whether they want to use new technologies.

It is, however, important to keep a critical eye on the distinction between tools that extend human capacity and processes that bypass the human entirely. This becomes harder to articulate, let alone defend, when the results can be indistinguishable. We should heed the danger of following the logic of technological advancements, and to adapt our concepts and philosophies to suit the technology, rather than allowing for a deeper understanding.

There are, naturally, economic and practical dimensions I’m setting aside here, questions about labour, copyright and the sustainability of artistic careers. These matter enormously. But they are downstream of a more fundamental question about what we value in art and why.

Perhaps, then, this technological moment does us an unexpected favour. By pushing the logic of production to its limit, AI exposes its own insufficiency, and, in doing so, clears the space for an older, slower understanding of art: one in which value lies not in what is made, but in what is transformed along the way.

So perhaps the question is not who replaces whom, but what remains truly human in the act of creation.

In future posts, I’ll be exploring this thought further – not to defend artistic production from automation, but to ask what it means to create when the distinction between the mechanical and organic creations grows so thin that their value can no longer be measured by the output itself.