In 2018, legal scholar Tim Wu wrote in the New York Times that: Today’s cult of convenience fails to acknowledge that difficulty is a constitutive feature of human experience. Convenience is all destination and no journey. This piece well predates the current AI boom, but “all destination and no journey” is a pretty good explanation for why using AI to create art is mainly compelling to people who think about creativity in terms of producing content and generating intellectual property. They just want the thing they can market and sell for money or clout; they don’t care how they got there. I know you’re sick of talking about AI. I am too. This is only a little bit about AI, I promise. Like all my writing about technology, it’s mostly about people.
Is AI the greatest art heist in history?
New technologies of reproduction are plundering the art world – and getting away with it
Why A.I. Isn’t Going to Make Art
To create a novel or a painting, an artist makes choices that are fundamentally alien to artificial intelligence.
Wherein I Find Myself Writing About Writing
Most everyone finds writing to be challenging (especially those who say they enjoy it). This is because writing is an intentional, thoughtful act. This is as it should be, but “AI” has recently exacerbated the misbelief that writing is simply an output. In fact, it's a creative process that has merit in and of itself.
AI in scientific publishing: Slower, worse, and more expensive
There’s a saying in the management world, popularized by NASA administrator Daniel Goldin in the 1990s, that the goal of technological improvements is to make products faster, better, and cheaper. Although this strategy had some success in the aerospace industry, the zealots of artificial intelligence (AI) have been making the same argument regarding how it will transform work, claiming that so little human effort will be required that humanity will enter an era of radical abundance, free from disease, drudgery, and danger, among other benefits, leaving society with more time for creative pursuits. But history tells a different story. When machines began to increase productivity during the second industrial revolution, American engineer Frederick Winslow Taylor’s The Principles of Scientific Management encouraged corporations to use surveillance to get employees to work harder and longer, an approach that exhausted and discouraged workers and led to the transfer of knowledge and any decision-making from workers to management, while enriching the profits for only those at the top. Yet, it remains foundational to the American economic enterprise. Indeed, scientific publishing is starting to experience some Taylorism with the insertion of AI. Rigorous human checking of AI-generated research papers is creating bottlenecks as publishers strive to maintain the integrity of the scientific record. The challenge is requiring even more human effort, making the whole endeavor slower and more expensive.
AI and the Fall? of the Creative Class
America is Losing Hundreds of Thousands of Jobs in Media, Film & the Arts. How Much is AI to Blame?
AI Artists Have No Role Models
Prompt Engineers Lack Any Canon, Don't You? AI artists have an existential problem: they consume only their own work, severing the dialogue of culture that…
Pluralistic: IP can’t save you from AI (18 Aug 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
You don't have to believe that AI "art" is any good (I don't), nor do you have to believe that AI "art" can be any good (I don't) to understand that the reason that the capital markets are putting trillions into AI is that they believe they can fire workers of every kind and replace them with AI:
AI FOR EPISTEMICS & COORDINATION
Civilization and technology have radically improved the human condition. Nonetheless, the world sometimes goes in directions which essentially nobody would prefer — e.g., nuclear arms races, unexpected financial crashes, predatory marketing, or ubiquitous political misinformation.
AI, I tried to love you – Writings and rehearsals by Nathan Schneider
Among my peers who study the cultures and economies surrounding technology, I often find myself more tech-positive than most. On the whole I like computers, like the internet, and like in general the emergent human creativity that these things have enabled and revealed. A source of my appreciation is that I expend a lot of effort on the practice of “slow computing,” which is to say, choosing tools and technical communities that I can feel in right relationship with. I tend to approach new socio-technologies (like gig economies, blockchains, and social media) not from a perspective of why is this so bad? so much as asking how could we do this right?
FRICTIONAL AI WORKSHOP
Topics of the Workshop In its third edition, this workshop builds on and expands its exploration of friction-in-design in AI systems, hosting a full-day event that challenges the pursuit of seamless, rapid interactions. In contrast to the conventional narrative that human over-reliance on AI stems
Trevor Paglen and Holly Herndon on Making Art with AI and What the Discourse Is Missing
The artists talk process, slop, and why optimism and pessimism don’t quite cover it.
The cinematograph, the "noematograph," and the future of AI art
From the cinematograph to the "noematograph," the Hugh-winning author explores how technology has, and may still, breed new artistic forms.
Itai Yanai on Twitter / X
Unpopular opinion: Going straight to AI limits your creatively, because it short-circuits the iterative process you need to develop new ideas. pic.twitter.com/O2iPs0bfh0— Itai Yanai (@ItaiYanai) June 20, 2026
Writing With AI Is Harder Than You Think
It takes rigor, judgment, and willingness to be told your work isn't good enough.
“The task that generative A.I. has been most successful at is lowering our expectations, both of the things we read and of ourselves when we write anything for others to read.” — Ted Chiang
Why A.I. Isn’t Going to Make Art
www.newyorker.comThere is starting to be some genuinely interesting AI-created film stuff (among a flood of slop), and I suspect this will only accelerate. The “is it art?” debate will grow Benjamin’s 1935 essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” already argued it’s likely the wrong question.
