You’re listening to music, but the lyrics — robotic and artificial – don’t sound quite right. You’re reading a book, but you feel like you’ve already read the generic, cliche plot a thousand times before. You’re watching a movie, but the actress looks uncanny, and not quite human.
This is the world of AI-generated art forms — a world that we catapult further into each time somebody uses ChatGPT to generate a funny song.
Sure, it might be fun to laugh at AI-generated art from time to time. Last month, The Shakerite reviewed eight songs generated by AI country “artist” Breaking Rust, poking fun at the generic composition and cliche lyrics (“They say, ‘Slow down, boy, don’t go too fast’/But I ain’t never been one to live in the past/I keep looking forward, never looking back/with a worn-out hat and a six-string strap.” But the Breaking Rust song that includes those lyrics, “Walk My Walk,” reached No. 1 on Billboard’s Country Digital Song Sales chart. AI art is nothing to laugh at when it upstages human creation and replaces real artists.
AI is advancing in artistic spaces without guardrails. In November 2024, an AI-generated portrait of Alan Turing — a British mathematician – sold at an auction for $1.08 million. This year, Xicoia, the AI division of production company Particle6 Group, created an AI-generated “actress” named Tilly Norwood. According to an article by the New York Post, her creators spent hours “laboring over her name, ensuring it sounded authentically British and universally unique,” and designed her image to “resemble that of a beautiful, whitish-looking woman who’d resonated with global audiences.”
These creations are designed to replace human talent; they are designed to replace the passion and dedication of working artists with a cheaper, quicker solution.
Reading. Watching movies. Touring museums, writing stories, playing instruments, creating — these are pursuits that emerge from emotion. AI may produce grammatically-correct writing and catchy songs (sometimes), but it can’t produce emotion.
Robots don’t possess the lived experiences that humans do. When AI takes over art, passion and emotion cease to exist in the places where they are most meant to thrive.
We even see this erasure in our own school. A new district document on AI, titled the “Artificial Intelligence in Education: Guidelines for Teacher/Administrator Use,” states that students may “harness generative AI to spark creativity across diverse subjects, including writing, visual arts, and music composition.” But the phrase “using AI to spark creativity” is a paradox. Using AI to brainstorm ideas is a rejection of creativity. It takes away a fundamental part of the artistic process — using your own ideas and experiences to create something personalized and unique to you.
Students don’t need a chat bot to spit out a list of starting points for their essay, or a premise for their project. They can use their brains, just as they always have. Through these guidelines, the district is allowing and encouraging our generation to sacrifice their creativity for AI.
Compose a corny song. Draw a bad sketch. Write a story for no reason other than to create. Stop asking ChatGPT to brainstorm for you. Stop asking it to compose, write, paint and act. We can only slow the flood of AI generation by combatting it with human creation.
A version of this article appears in print on page 11 of Volume 96, Issue 3, published Dec. 15, 2025.
