AI and the Death of Creativity

In a consumer-based society, creation becomes the most important aspect of keeping our lives our own. In contrast to purchasing and shopping, creation is an act of rebellion against societal pressures to constantly purchase the newest trends. Being able to create something of your own that did not exist before is powerful – it says we are not just here to take and consume, we are here to contribute. 

There’s something deeply human about making art. Not just in the finished product, but in the aching, obsessive, uncertain process of creating it. A poem that never feels quite done. A song written during a breakup, voice cracking at painful memories. A painting whose artist stayed up too late to finish, their hands stained with the hues of every emotion felt during the creation. It’s messy, and it matters. Or at least, it used to.

Now, we’re seeing how machines can rid art of this process and yield the end result faster, cheaper, and with fewer feelings involved.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is flooding the creative industry. AI-generated songs, scripts, books, paintings, photography, acting and commercials, even voices. Platforms like ChatGPT, Midjourney, Sora, and Suno aren’t just tools for creating, they’re replacements. And they’re being used that way: to cut costs, to manufacture content, to erase the need for messy, emotional, inconvenient people across artistic fields.

We’ve entered an era where art can be mimicked, rather than felt. And not enough of the general public seem to care.

The creative industry was already bruised. Writers don’t make money. Musicians barely own their music. Visual artists have to turn their portfolios into “aesthetic” Instagram grids in order to gain popularity. On social media platforms, artists were already forced to compete with algorithms, we just didn’t think we’d be replaced by them, too.

Ask most Gen Z creatives, and they’ll tell you how they often feel lost, scared, and displaced when it comes to planning a future. What's the point of becoming a writer when AI models can churn out a thousand-word article in seconds? Why learn to draw if someone can recreate a perfect imitation of your style, without ever knowing your name or seeing the original work?

The internet is flooded with AI-generated content and most people can’t even tell the difference anymore. Some don’t want to. It’s easier to accept the illusion, and it’s cheaper to fund it. But I don’t think we should confuse convenience with creativity. Art isn’t valuable because it’s efficient. It’s valuable because it’s vulnerable. Because someone made it, and in making it, risked something. If AI is being used to create art that risk of real vulnerability in the creative process vanishes.

In a world run by AI, there’s no fear of failure. No joy in imperfection. There’s just endless, flat production. We’re not building culture, we’re feeding a content machine.

And yes, AI can be useful. It can speed up design workflows, spark inspiration, and summarize your data or fix your grammar. The tool itself isn’t the problem, but the replacement of authentic art is. 

Creativity was never meant to be optimized. It’s supposed to be inefficient. Emotional. Human. And if we let machines redefine what it means to make something beautiful, we don’t just lose jobs, we lose soul, and we lose culture. We're losing the story that shares our journeys, where we've been and what we've suffered. We're losing the rawness in these art forms. Music, film, literature, painting, dance, are how we've historically held our pain, passed on our memory, and envisioned something better. 

Gen-Z is at risk of losing this. We’re the generation most digitally fluent, but also the most emotionally disoriented. Many of us don’t journal. Don’t paint. Don’t write alone in our bedrooms the way older generations did. Not because we’re lazy, but because the systems around us make it feel pointless. Why spend hours making something imperfect when a machine can do it instantly, and “better”? But this mindset is dangerous. Because it removes from us the slow tedious process that art once had.

If we're going to return to that, we have to stop looking at creativity as a competition and stop looking for shortcuts. We have to return to art as a way of making sense of being alive.

Gen-Z grew up on stories filled with magic and fantasy. Music that pulled strings in our bodies we didn’t even know were there, something ancient from our bones. Paintings that didn’t just look like something, but felt like someone. That’s what’s at stake. Not just the industry. But the “why” behind it all. Art should be fueled by personal experience, history, and identity.

So keep making things, even if no one’s watching. Even if a robot can do it better. Because the point was never perfection or auto-generation. The point was being alive enough to try and brave enough to share the human experience, and that's something a machine can never mimic.