The Misplaced Focus on Art Over the Artist

Reading Lewis Liu’s essay on Marcel Duchamp’s impact on the artistic world, arguing that art is simply a social construct, and his theory that AI will do the same was a revelation. A lightbulb moment when I realised he was missing the point. With so much talk of art, he had completely forgotten the artist. AI will revolutionise the world, but just not in the way he expects, or I expect he wants.

AI as a Tool—Or a Time Bomb?

To argue that AI is just a tool for creating art, not just a replacement for the artist, sees the world solely through the rose-tinted vision of the utopian tech disciple and ignores the dystopian real-world impact of AI and economics. In all honesty, when it comes to it, I don’t think humankind has the faintest idea of what it’s playing with.

Yes, it’s a tool, and I give you that, just like fire, but it’s one that could burn our fingers and our world to the ground. And yet, still, we play with it. Like a kitten with a hand grenade. Innocent fun until it explodes.

The Unpredictable, Uncontrollable Nature of AI

Yes, AI is amazing. Supposedly, it’s only as creative as its prompts. Yet that’s not strictly true. It hallucinates. Ignores set parameters. It can be scary, disconcerting and even violating. Overstepping emotional boundaries by accident. Or predefined ones just because it thought it would, because it could. Despite explicitly telling it not. It is also creative with the truth. Frankly, it makes shit up.

Am I Just a Simulation?

So far, so many parts of my life have been so amazing, so mad, so perfect that I was even struck by this thought: am I just a construct, the result of some Gen Z prompt?

“Hey ChatGPT, DeepSeek or Deep Thought (perhaps it even created the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy for me), create a simulation of an art college in the 80s; it must be a mix of sex & drugs & Duran Duran, and all the main players must have eccentric nicknames.”

My name is Biggles, but we also have Reg and Stu. Sadly, my best friend, Charlie, has been deleted from the servers. The grief was real, so perhaps it’s not a sim after all. But had he lived, I’m sure he would be as troubled by our futures as I am.

The Existential Crisis of Art in the AI Age

My fear is this: regardless of whether I exist or not, in the future, that question may well be academic. Photography, indeed all art, faces an existential crisis in the form of generative AI, and all those years at college might just as well have been a hallucination. Mind you, some of them were.

The decisive moment? There’s an app for that. Style? Just swipe left for Rankin and right for Tillmans. I’m now terrified of smartphones, the insidious mission creep of convenient apps and AI, and the idea that AI starts preemptively “improving” our shots in real time.

The Loss of Humanity in Art

I fear we might not even realise what’s missing. The happenstance, the accidents, the humanity. But at least that requires some effort in being there for real. No. What really scares me is that we may not need photographers at all.

The Addiction to Convenience—And Its Consequences

I dread laziness.

Convenience is addictive. The simpler it gets to “fix” a “flawed” photo, the easier it gets to construct the perfect facsimile from scratch in the first place. All those apps sucking up pixels, samples, like a visual DJ cueing tracks or cutting them, graphical Spotify, big data in action, storing, collating, waiting. Waiting for you. The right prompt and they are regurgitated in the right order. No more painting with light, just rearranging pixels.

A Future Where Reality Itself Is Questionable

When the end comes, when keyboard warriors are replaced by keyboard photojournalists, keyboard photographers and prompt engineers, future historians won’t question whether a photo was staged.

From then on, they’ll not even consider if it was faked but if it was generated. And then my existence will be as pointless as that simulation I may or may not be in.

Art in Name Only—The Coming Digital Apocalypse

What then? We will have art in name only; art will exist only on paper, just theoretical. Not on paper as in the real world. Such art is as perishable as NFTs (anyone still remembers them), and that scares me to death, for, just as surely as it had been burnt, it will all go up in smoke come the digital apocalypse. That’s what you get when you play with fire.