AI Art Is Weird, Sad, and Ugly. Let’s Not Pretend Otherwise.

Because capitalism orients people toward profit rather than allowing us to pursue our interests freely, it inevitably separates humans from the creative act. AI art is just the slop frothing up from that gap.

There was a time when people imagined AI’s final form as a great metallic beast with malice in its mind — or, perhaps more realistically, as an unseen yet limitless network of accumulated knowledge that could render humanity obsolete simply by outperforming it. There’s something idealistic about those apocalyptic visions, some latent optimism in the belief that our destruction will emerge from a fair fight against a worthy foe created by the hubris of those with money and capital.

But reality is often disappointing. Generative AI is just as cruel as some had feared — it destroys wor