As a creative, it’s hard for me not to find generative AI’s prevalence an attack on my humanity. I have long thought of art and creativity as an abstract human transformation of stimuli. Cutting the human out of this equation (or placing the human at either end of the process, rather than in it) is not inherently “bad,” but neither is it—by definition—creative.

It won’t take our jobs, but it will take our agency: we have a long track record of sacrificing anything and everything for convenience (read: each other, the environment, our health, our attention spans). Convenience, of course, is just the selling point to us laypeople—late capitalist bourgeoisie benefits financially by producing a new commodity. Using generative AI for creative means seems to me the next logical step in this process—the sacrifice of our humanity.

All the same, the ship has sailed on many of the sacrifices I mention above. If there is a way to use AI to reclaim some of this ground, I’m all for it. A facet of this of course, is reclaiming lost time—long since claimed by “the machine.” We can mindfully use generative AI as a productivity tool, preserving our collective conscience and without sacrificing our independent capacities for humanity.