This Artist & Best-Selling Author Agree: AI Can’t Replace Us.

AI won’t kill the art world, it will expand it.

We artists are not entitled to financial support for our art. Just like every other person who works for a living, if we want their money, our job is to offer our fellow humans something they value. When artists demonize AI for daring to compete with them, they lose sight of what an artist’s job really is.

Integrally invited me to speak with best-selling author and OpenAI prompt engineer Andrew Mayne about why fear over AI often aims at the wrong targets. Having written multiple novels, been on television shows like Discovery Channel’s Shark Week, and worked closely with AI developers, Andrew has one foot in the creative world and one in the tech world. So why isn’t he afraid of being replaced?

Many artists have taken up the anti-competitive, monopolizing strategy used by some of the big corporations they hate. Rather than share the playing field with new creators who are no longer limited by a lack of budget, art world connections, or technical skills, they seek to block these new players from the game. These artists have become censors—calling to ban AI, shaming people for using it, and making copyright arguments that defy the famous wisdom T.S. Elliot left us:

great artists steal.

I’ve painted, sung, photographed, written poems, and crafted essays. Every medium I’ve worked in can now be augmented or entirely created by AI. And nothing about that scares me because my art has never been solely about the medium. This is the ugly truth artists and everyone afraid of AI need to face: when a better way of doing something threatens your way, reality is telling you it’s time to evolve. Andrew refers to this as “disruption.” Whether that disruption is met with the flexibility of water or the rigidity of stone shapes its impact.

Change is often painful. I sympathize with artists who’ve specialized in being skilled at a medium, whether it was the portrait artists put out of work by the camera or the musicians losing work to virtual instruments. Portrait artists and musicians still exist, but the technology that made their skills less in-demand ultimately gifted creative expression to more people (and if there’s one word artists [used to] love, it’s accessibility.)

How many artists today would’ve painted brilliant portraits if only the camera had never come along? We can’t know, because they’ve already adapted to that technology by channeling their brilliance into something else.

I see AI no differently than any of the past innovations that made creation easier: moving from expensive film to digital, from time-consuming paintings to instant photos, from physical instruments to software that brings hundreds of virtual instruments into your bedroom studio. Is it still a rich, unique experience to see a live orchestra? Absolutely. Does that make it bad that a young, broke musician can add a virtual violin to their music?

To recognize the benefits of technology isn’t to deny its problems. But rather than fixate on either side of that spectrum, we should understand that tools contain both benefits and harms. Your kitchen is stocked with tools that make overconsumption easy. Weapons save lives as readily as they end them. Even the lights in your house are a tool that lets you control your time, freeing morning-haters like me to wake up later than first light, but at the cost of disrupting our circadian rhythm. Instead of fighting a losing battle against our tool-loving nature, Andrew lists some of the different options we have for addressing those problems, like re-skilling programs.

Fear is poison to the creative process. In their fear, artists are losing the curiosity we depend on for seeing and depicting the world in new, insightful ways. The fear of being “replaced” betrays a lack of belief in one’s own individuality. No human being on earth is having the same experience of life that we are. The tools we use to express this inimitable experience aren’t the point—it’s what we’re expressing that makes art so meaningful. We are not our tools. Whether cameras, software, or AI, tools simply enable more would-be artists to take part in exploring their unique slice of life.

“There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and be lost.”
— Martha Graham

The fear over job-loss and AI “stealing” art relies on a dangerous misunderstanding of the artist’s role: we artists are doomed/blessed to never truly own our work because we never own the inspiration that creates it. We tap into something far bigger than our limited selves, something that allows the work of both an anonymous poet in ancient China and a world-famous contemporary American rapper to touch the same place in the heart of a total stranger.

AI can’t kill that magic, but reducing it to copyrights and tools will.

⏱️ Timestamps:
0:00 Intro
0:23 Will AI kill creativity?
1:36 Seeing AI as a tool, not a competitor
2:04 Similarities between the invention of photography and AI
5:12 Will AI accelerate problems like misinformation and tribalism?
7:31 AI "Safeguards" or attacks on our autonomy?
8:08 Will the economic disruption from AI be worth the benefits?
10:30 Ways of dealing with the disruptions from tech innovation

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I’ve partnered with Integrally on this series because this app invites us to think more deeply and use dialogue to better understand our own beliefs. Integrally facilitates anonymous, constructive disagreements that get evaluated on the quality of their reasoning rather than their popularity. It’s great for testing your own ideas through disagreement and refining your debate skills without drama, outrage, and irrationality. Join me there to discuss the ideas Andrew shared and more.

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