The fastest way to change someone's mind about AI art
Most defences of AI creativity contain the same hidden contradiction.
At any given moment over the past 12 months of writing about AI, I’ve been fighting the urge to comment “yikes” under every defence of AI art.
Is this level of pettiness justified? Absolutely. But I’m not sure it’s particularly helpful.
Which is why I’ve been trying to reel in my frustration and think more seriously about how we have better conversations about AI, creativity and meaning.
Otherwise debates will continue to collapse, people will continue shouting past one another and the weird twitch in my right eye that kicks in every time I go on LinkedIn will continue to intensify.
This week’s essay is all about that.
I wanted to share something I’ve found surprisingly useful when talking about AI and creativity. Now, fair warning, it won’t work every time. It might not even work most of the time.
But I do think it’s one of the better ways to encourage more critical thinking around the subject. And, it has very little to do with the technology itself.
It’s really all about asking people to apply the same logic they’re applying to AI creativity to something they personally value and have worked hard for.
So when someone tells me that AI-generated books, music or art are simply “levelling the playing field”, or that AI creativity is no different from human creativity, I sometimes ask whether they’d feel the same way if I used a taxi to complete a marathon.
Or a jet ski for the swimming section of a triathlon.
Or a helicopter to reach the summit of a mountain.
Or if your child spent ten years learning the piano, only to lose a competition to someone who pressed "play" on a self-playing keyboard?
You get the idea.
Now, some people genuinely won’t see a problem with any of those examples. But I’m not sure there’s any getting through to those who are comfortable outsourcing everything to AI for a little instant gratification. (I think of those people a little like Cypher from The Matrix.)
But what I’ve found is that most people who don’t value the process of creating art still value effort, mastery and authenticity somewhere else in their lives.
And that people often defend frictionless efficiency most strongly in areas they don’t personally care much about, whilst fiercely protecting effort and struggle in the things that matter deeply to them.
The person who sees no issue with AI-generated novels might spend years training for a marathon.
The person who dismisses the value of learning an instrument might care deeply about mastering a craft, building a business or earning expertise in their own field.
The principle is often the same. It’s simply being applied inconsistently.
That’s why I find these thought experiments so useful. They’re not designed to trap people or win arguments. They’re designed to help people recognise values they already hold elsewhere and consider whether those same values might apply here too.
Psychologists would probably describe this as inviting in some sort of cognitive dissonance: the discomfort that appears when our values stop lining up across different situations. And I think it’s often in that discomfort where better conversations can begin.
And, don’t worry, I know how this sounds.
There’s certainly an arrogance lurking in my argument here that assumes someone else’s thinking needs changing. I’m well aware of that.
But my concern has never really been about protecting my point of view. It’s not even about protecting art for art’s sake here, though I absolutely would!
Instead, what I’m getting at is more the importance of protecting the parts of life that derive their value from participation.
Because I increasingly feel, reporting on AI and its impact most days, as though we’re being encouraged to optimise our way out of experiences that were never supposed to be optimised.
Not all struggle is meaningful. I’ve written a lot here about burnout, overwork and how the endless hamster wheel of productivity culture is doing nothing for us.
But some forms of struggle are different. The struggle of learning, thinking, writing, creating and making sense of the world. Those aren’t unfortunate obstacles standing between us and meaning. They’re where meaning comes from.
What these thought experiments often reveal is that the argument was never really about AI, but about values.
About why we celebrate effort in some domains and dismiss it in others.
So that’s why I think the goal here isn’t to convince people to care about art.
It’s to help them recognise that the values they already defend elsewhere may deserve to be applied a little more consistently.
Further reading from the archives:
The AI futures that scare me the most aren’t violent, they’re comfortable
The self-development trap: why trying harder keeps you burned out
Great analogies! I think there must be a connection between how aggressively the arts have been devalued in recent years and how people have subsequently reduced it to an output-only exercise they can replicate easily, then act surprised to learn about the hidden craft behind it.
I think you do touch on important points about effort, meaning, and participation here, and I fully agree that we shouldn’t optimize away every meaningful struggle. But I’m not sure your examples fully map onto all the different reasons why people use AI art.
A lot of your analogies (like taking a taxi in a marathon, using a jet ski in a triathlon, or pressing the "DEMO" key on a Casio keyboard in a piano competition) are situations with agreed-upon rules, shared expectations, and/or a competitive frame. In those contexts, yes, I agree that bypassing the process undermines the whole point.
But that’s not the same as, say, my own use cases. I use AI to create images for my newsletter. Often, I want to make a piece more visually interesting than if I'd used yet another generic stock photo (or, as is more often the case, because there is no existing imagery that depicts the scene/image I have in mind). But at the same time, I don’t have the time or skill to create custom artwork, nor do I have the budget to commission any. When I include those images, I’m not claiming to have mastered illustration. I'm not entering those images into an art contest, nor am I asking anyone to admire my "brushwork" (or prompts, as it were). I’m simply using a tool to communicate more effectively, within very real constraints.
I also think there’s a danger in treating “process” as though it’s always the thing being defended within the Discourse. Sometimes it is, sure. And sometimes, often, maybe even usually, the process is the meaning, in and of itself. But sometimes the meaning is in the finished thing: the idea within an essay, the argument, the things you are trying to communicate. So considering this, not every instance of reducing friction is necessarily a moral or artistic failure.
And practically speaking, we’re now in a world where refusing to use these tools can create a real competitive disadvantage. For independent writers, small businesses, teachers, more niche creators, and other people without huge audiences or institutional backing, the choice is almost never between AI and a human artist, but between AI and nothing at all. So am I supposed to make my work less compelling, lose ground professionally, or struggle more financially in order to uphold a purity standard that people with more resources can more easily afford?
I posit that there’s no shame in making life less difficult where you can, especially when life is already enough of a struggle as it is. To me, the more useful distinction is not whether someone used AI at all, but whether they've used it honestly, respectfully, in an appropriate context, and without pretending it's something that it's not.