Podcast – Cory Doctorow's craphound.com

Why I don’t like AI art

Mar 30, 2025

The discussion dives into the essence of art as a deep communication of feelings from the artist to the audience. It critiques AI-generated art for lacking the rich, nuanced intent behind human creativity. The speaker reflects on the emotional disconnect found in AI works, emphasizing that true artistry involves countless subtle decisions that AI simply cannot replicate. The conversation also touches on upcoming community events, alongside personal anecdotes that add a relatable touch to the overall narrative.

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Quick takeaways

Art is a nuanced communication process involving countless subtle decisions by the artist to convey profound feelings.

AI-generated art often lacks the depth and intent of human creativity, rendering it soulless and less impactful.

Deep dives

Impact of AI on Academic References

AI technologies have significantly altered the landscape of academic reference letters, with professors now inundated with requests from students who may not have the same level of merit as in the past. Traditionally, professors would write letters only for students they deemed worthy, providing a strong signal of a student's capabilities. However, the rise of chatbots that can generate reference letters from minimal input has resulted in professors feeling pressured to write more letters for a larger number of students. Consequently, this change dilutes the quality and communicative intent of letters, reducing them to basic bullet points rather than a rich, nuanced evaluation of a student's qualifications.

Intro

4min

The Dilution of Artistic Intent in AI-generated Works

7min

Reflections on AI Art and Upcoming Events

2min

This week on my podcast, I read Why I don’t like AI art, a column from last week’s Pluralistic newsletter:

Which brings me to art. As a working artist in his third decade of professional life, I’ve concluded that the point of art is to take a big, numinous, irreducible feeling that fills the artist’s mind, and attempt to infuse that feeling into some artistic vessel – a book, a painting, a song, a dance, a sculpture, etc – in the hopes that this work will cause a loose facsimile of that numinous, irreducible feeling to manifest in someone else’s mind.

Art, in other words, is an act of communication – and there you have the problem with AI art. As a writer, when I write a novel, I make tens – if not hundreds – of thousands of tiny decisions that are in service to this business of causing my big, irreducible, numinous feeling to materialize in your mind. Most of those decisions aren’t even conscious, but they are definitely decisions, and I don’t make them solely on the basis of probabilistic autocomplete. One of my novels may be good and it may be bad, but one thing is definitely is is rich in communicative intent. Every one of those microdecisions is an expression of artistic intent.

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(Image: Cryteria, CC BY 3.0, modified)