AI Won’t Create Beautiful Art

Over the past few years, a fear has become widespread among people who work creatively: that AI tools will reduce the value of their work and skills. So a question naturally arises—one that would have been unthinkable just a few decades ago: can a computer autonomously create something truly new?

Computer

Historically, the word “computer” referred to manual work performed primarily by women. It involved solving complex equations needed for military, industrial, and other applications. As technology advanced, the same word became associated with extraordinarily sophisticated machines—first ones that took up entire rooms, and today ones that can fit in a backpack. Still, the nature of the tasks they’re meant to perform has remained unchanged.

Fundamentally, they execute only fully specified, deterministic algorithms that manipulate data.

Creation and Re-creation

From this perspective, it may seem obvious that creative work is something entirely different—something that can’t be mathematized or described as an algorithm. You can’t write a detailed set of instructions for how to paint an extraordinary picture or write a gripping novel. There are, of course, certain formulaic elements of craft that you can genuinely treat as technical aspects of creation.

But can we truly say that great art is only the result of excellent technique? Some works that rely solely on re-creation may indeed convey nothing on an intellectual or emotional level. High art, however, requires making something new—something moving not only through technical skill, but through rich, stirring content.

Automation

Which parts of creative work, defined this way, could a machine take over? Machines seem to be taking over more and more purely technical skills—like generating finished images or writing texts—yet behind them are only statistical models expressed as computer code. To claim that a model can fully replace an artist would be equivalent to accepting that a sufficiently complex algorithm is capable of thinking, creating, and executing the craft fully. Do you think it's possible to write a van-gogh.py that would do more than imitate a style—that would invent one autonomously and rearrange what people even think painting is for?

We would then have to assume that creativity is not a trait or a skill, but the result of a random walk , perhaps somewhat aided by knowledge and experience. It’s obvious that machines and algorithms are starting to take over parts—or even all—of the execution process. Good. Much of my experience with making things has been about testing different ideas and rejecting most of them. Now, each attempt can require a much smaller investment of time.

How to live

Treat AI as another tool that can support your work—not as a competitor that will take it away entirely. The claim that a model will replace a worker is naïve—but an artist who completely renounces new technologies may genuinely fall behind the competition. Try to automate the most monotonous, repetitive parts of your work. Don’t rely on AI completely; don’t fear it. Use these new improvements to the extent you can.