The AI that has Colonized our Creativity

Everyone’s talking about AI, and you’re being pestered to use it every time you open your phone. But are you aware the extent that AI has taken over how much of what you see and hear online?

A study by Five Percent reported a few weeks ago that 52 percent of all new text online is now generated by AI. Seventy-four percent of all writing online now shows signs of “involvement” of AI. The French music streaming platform Deezer says some 50,000 AI-created tracks are uploaded to its site every day. That’s a third of all the new music Deezer gets in every day. And you’ve probably noticed that your Facebook and TikTok streams are clogged with atrociously improbable AI video.

AI chatbots now produce nearly flawless text and images. A staggering amount of new software code is created by AI (especially good on Claude). New Sora and Veo video generators and Suno and Udio music generators spin out millions of songs, all of which are created just by users describing what they want. Even a seasoned producer like Rick Beato was blown away.

Debates about quality of these AI-produced creative products seem to be all but settled. AI songs attributed to AI artists now rack up millions of listens and followers. Made-up AI social media “influencers” have huge loyal followings. And Eline Van der Velden, a British-Dutch technologist and actress who founded the AI talent studio Xicoia, created an AI actress named Tilly Norwood, and announced she was up for roles.

But you can tell the difference between human and AI products, right? Maybe not. A new study reported that 97 percent of listeners, when tested, couldn’t tell whether the music being played was AI or human. In the classroom, AI use is so rampant — by both teachers and students — that one educator lamented that courses are being created by AI for students who have AI do the work to be graded by AI.

To come full circle, AI not only creates but also consumes. News websites are now besieged by AI bots crawling their content and delivering it to users using AI for their queries. Human traffic is down as much as 40 percent at news sites as bots answer searches. Journalism’s already precarious business models start to look impossible when there’s little need for users to visit original sources. Recent estimates suggest that more than 50 percent of all traffic on the web is AI bots crawling sites for content. The traffic can be so intense that sites such as ArtsJournal can slow to a crawl due to AI bot traffic.

One recent study claims that AI will never create art better than what would be considered human amateur level. Maybe. But it doesn’t really have to. In the early days of YouTube, critics decried the shaky camera use and bad lighting of the uploaded user videos. But it wasn’t long before those technical flaws were embraced not as lower quality but as signifiers of authenticity. Time and time again, “lower” quality as defined by one generation becomes ubiquitous must-have qualities for the next generation. Along the way, the subtle (and not-so-subtle) failings often turn out to be “values” as the new form takes over.

AI-generated creativity has already firmly inserted itself into the middle of our culture, and with each passing day is influencing the language and values of new work being made. Soon its ubiquity will be banal, unremarkable. For sure, the base level of what the average person can create will rise. Just as the cameras in our phones made everyone a photographer, AI will boost the sophistication of our abilities to make things. Surely a more creatively-empowered public… is a good thing?

Already, though, slogging through the tsunamis of AI-slop (great word, that), it becomes easier and easier to be put off by the too-perfect video, the generically-inspirational songs and the emotionally-empty cloying images cranked out by the machines. Yes these things are real, but they’re also kind of meaningless in their calculated reality. Just the fact they’re so easily spun out in endless variation in which any “artistic” choice is an effortless algorithm of the same value as any other, is… well annoying.

On the other hand, the generic Big Mac, turned out by the millions every day, seems to not only satisfy a hungry public, but genuinely appeal to them. A healthy, thoughtfully-prepared organic meal might, in every objective measure of quality be a better choice, but we all know which Happy Meal will win with consumers.

The backlash to AI is building. Artists, teachers, and even some technologists insist that real art has to be rooted in experience, in decision, accident, failure, experience and the insistence of a point of view. Machines don’t possess any of these, which is precisely why the results can feel so frictionless. Yet a public increasingly acclimated to letting algorithms choose what culture they consume seems unbothered. If culture arrives already sorted, playlisted, captioned, and optimized, maybe intention becomes just another optional setting.

There are plenty of historical parallels. Every major technological shift has forced a reconsideration of what counts as art or artists: photography, film, sampling, Photoshop. The difference this time is we are no longer talking about a new tool or style but an absorption of the making itself. The question isn’t whether AI work “counts” as creative (it already functions that way in the marketplace), but what happens to the human urge to make when the cultural value of “making” shifts.

The old what-is-art debate is a cliche. We’ve never definitively named it, preferring perhaps to let it live in mystery. But in a world where creation becomes ambient, authorship porous, and meaning optional, art might not disappear so much as move to the edges where some who still care bother to wrestle with the stubborn, inconvenient business of deciding what something should be. That won’t stop the flood of AI-slop, or the millions who happily consume it. But it does suggest the next frontier isn’t proving machines can’t make art, it’s figuring out why we still try when the culture doesn’t seem to care.