The Unraveling of Art

OPINION

Once, to commission a photograph for a local restaurant’s menu meant hiring someone—a photographer who had spent years learning to see light, a stylist who understood how to make a plate look inviting, a retoucher who knew that fixing that one shadow could make the difference between appetizing and artificial. The final image was never just pigment on paper; it was a chain of decisions, each one a testament to a person who had invested time, trained their eye, and needed to pay rent. That irreplaceability, we told ourselves, was part of its value.

We may soon need a new story to tell.

The Problem of Product vs. Process

The conversation about artificial intelligence and art has, until now, fixated on capability. Can a machine generate a logo? Compose a jingle? Create the background illustration for a streaming series? These are parlor tricks that miss the point. The question isn’t what AI can do, but what we are willing to lose in letting it do so.

Art is not a product. It is a form of navigation, and for many, a means of survival. For millennia, humans have used song, story, and image to map the interior world—to encode grief, mark transcendence, or simply say what plain language cannot. But for just as long, this navigation has also been a trade. The sign painter, the wedding photographer, the session guitarist, the storyboard artist—these were not hobbyists. They were workers who translated human effort into cultural meaning, and that effort was compensated not just as labor, but as irreplaceable expertise.

This is the alchemy we now risk reducing to a prompt.

The Economic Ecosystem of Creativity

The economics of creativity have always been brutal, but they were anchored to a fundamental truth: scarcity. A jingle took days to compose. A photograph required a photographer to be present, to choose the moment. This scarcity—of time, of skill, of physical presence—created value, which in turn supported an ecosystem. Think of the album cover designers in Detroit, the storyboard artists in Los Angeles, the catalog photographers in the Midwest. Each was a node in a network that turned human attention into paychecks. The work was often industrial, yes. It was commercial, commissioned, deadline-driven. But it still required humans to show up, to have ideas, to manually move their hands across keyboards and camera dials and drawing tablets. Even the most routine creative job kept a person in the practice of seeing, deciding, making.

“We are not democratizing creativity; we are consolidating it, replacing a complex economy of human exchange with a single transaction between user and machine.”

— A Concerned Designer

When a small business owner can generate a hundred product images in an hour, the product photographer—who used to knock on doors with a portfolio, who built a career on knowing how to light a glass bottle—becomes a friction point to be eliminated. When an agency can synth-score a commercial, the composer who spent years studying not just music but the subtle emotional grammar of thirty-second spots finds their expertise compressed into a line item that reads “AI subscription: $30/month.”

A Voluntary Devaluation

What makes this moment particularly confounding is that it is entirely voluntary. We have, as a society, erected elaborate guardrails around other forms of human activity—not because they were impossible to pursue, but because we decided the cost was too high. We could, technically, harvest organs from the deceased without explicit consent; it would save thousands of lives annually. But we don’t, because we’ve collectively determined that bodily autonomy, even in death, is a line we will not cross. The efficiency gains are real, the logic is sound, but we chose to protect something we deemed more important than optimization.

Art, somehow, has not received this protection. We treat its devaluation as inevitable, a casualty of progress. But progress toward what? A world where every logo is a statistical average of every logo that came before it? Where every song is a pastiche of a thousand streaming playlists? This is not abundance; it is a flattening.

But perhaps what stings most is that we never even looked for another way. We held the pencil, had the paper ready, and then—the technology just started.

The Human Capacity for Course Correction

Here’s the thing: humanity is strange. We build pyramids. We spend centuries stacking rocks into precise geometric monuments for reasons that, even now, we can only half-explain. At another point in history, we decide the answer to everything is nuclear—nuclear energy, nuclear medicine, nuclear-powered cars. We pursue these obsessions with single-minded intensity, pouring resources and human effort into directions that, in hindsight, seem bewildering or reckless or both.

Progress is not a straight line, and it is certainly not always better. During the Industrial Revolution, we convinced ourselves it was acceptable—necessary, even—to have children work sixteen-hour shifts in factories. We built an entire economic system on that premise. It took decades of organizing, of strikes and legislation and moral reckoning, to pull ourselves back from that edge. The market didn’t correct itself. We had to intervene.

This is what we do. We lurch forward, often blindly, chasing whatever incentive structure has captured our collective attention. Sometimes we’re explorers, risking death to cross oceans. Sometimes we’re builders, erecting cathedrals that take generations to complete. Sometimes we’re industrialists, optimizing every variable until we’ve optimized the humanity out of the equation. And then, eventually, we stop. We look around, realize we’ve gone too far, and impose rules on ourselves—not because the technology couldn’t continue, but because we decided it shouldn’t.

The point is not that the answers are easy. Where to draw the line is never easy. Reasonable people will disagree about what deserves protection and what constitutes progress. But the argument here is simpler and more damning: we didn’t even try. We didn’t pause to ask whether the wholesale replacement of creative labor was a direction worth pursuing. We didn’t convene, didn’t debate, didn’t legislate. We just let it happen, as if the logic of the market were the only logic that mattered.

We are not as rational as we like to think we are. But we are capable of choosing. We’ve done it before—sometimes belatedly, sometimes imperfectly, but we’ve done it. The question is whether we’ll do it again, or whether we’ll look back in twenty years and wonder why we let this one slip through our fingers without so much as a conversation.