Did AI write this post?
Rethinking AI as a medium, not a threat. Like photography or film before it.
When people encounter a piece of art today - an image, a poem, a scene - there’s sometimes suspicion.
Did AI make that?
It’s used as an accusation, and as a way of stripping away the value of the piece. It makes an assumption that if the machine played a part in its creation then the work is tainted. Even fraudulent.
But that seems to me to be a false binary. We’re not looking at the wholly human or wholly machine. Art lies somewhere in between, in the interaction. We shouldn’t be asking if AI was involved, we should be asking how.
The threat lens
Every new artistic medium faces suspicion. Painters dismissed photography as a cheat. Mechanical reproduction that was incapable of artistry. Theater derided film as cheap spectacle, mass amusement rather than an art form capable of depth or meaning. Digital art was mocked as sterile - an inauthentic shortcut, not a practice.
AI has the same stigma now.
If AI shaped it, is it really art? Is it authentic?
Does this replace the artist entirely? Remove the human from the equation?
Won’t everything look the same? Be homogenized?
They’re perfectly reasonable anxieties. They’re also echoes of the same fears from earlier eras. And like photography, film, digital tools, the story shouldn’t just be about the threat.
Tools, medium, collaboration
We can frame AI simply as a tool. Think of it like an upgraded Photoshop. A cultural autocomplete. But that seems pretty limiting. Tools are an extension of human intention, but they don’t reshape forms of expression.
On the reverse of that, we might see AI as an entirely autonomous artist. As if the model “creates” independently. But this also falls short - without human input in the form of context, curation, intention, and refinement, AI’s outputs are raw material at best.
We should think of AI as a medium. Mediums aren’t passive. Oil paints behave in a different way, result in different art, than watercolors. 16mm film grain shapes an alternative experience to digital pixels. Mediums have textures and limitations. And artists worth with those mediums, finding creativity at the edges, by testing their thresholds.
AI is like that. A convergence of human input, algorithms and pattern recognition, and cultural data.
Crafted versus “spat out”
The accusations of “AI wrote that” or “AI made that” miss the point. There absolutely are shallow uses. Type in a prompt, publish the first output, and call it a day. That’s automation, that’s not art.
But what about engaged use? That’s different. It’s iterative. It’s rejecting nine results in order to find the tenth. Layering different outputs into a single collage. Editing heavily, to bend the model toward a personal vision. It can be structural, like deciding where to insert an AI-generated aspect into a broader work, staging an image within a performance.
That seems to me to be much the same as the difference between pressing a shutter button at random, and carefully composing, lighting, and developing a photograph. Both those tasks are using the same apparatus, but one of them reveals genuine craft.
Artistic enablement
Thinking of AI as our medium opens up new artistic possibilities.
Scaled collage. The capacity for vast recombination and remixing of fragments.
Iterative exploration. Testing dozens or hundreds of variations in the search for real resonance.
Embracing glitches. Using the strange errors, hallucinations, the artifacts of non-determinative AI outputs, as aesthetic in themselves.
Accessibility. Open new paths for creative participation. Democratize art for people excluded from traditional tools through training, resource, or physical limitation.
AI doesn’t create instead of an artist. It can create with the artist. That gives the artist a larger landscape of potential, to navigate, interpret, and reshape.
The artist’s role in all this
If AI is the medium, then we can better define the artist’s role. It’s one of contextualization, choice, and framing. The artistry is not instructing an AI model to “spit something out”, but in crafting a…relationship…with it.
Using prompts as poetic acts. A combination of brushstroke and an incantation.
Selecting the outputs. Choosing what really resonates, or subverts - that’s authorship.
Integrating AI into larger works. Using its material in installations, performances, writing requires vision and the ability to make meaning.
We’re not disappearing authorship, we’re transforming it. We don’t reduce photographers to merely their cameras. Filmmakers to their reels. Why should we try to reduce artists using AI to merely a single prompt? Their art is what they do with a medium.
From threat to normalization
We’ve seen that shift before. Photography has progressed from “mechanical theft” to fine art. Cinema isn’t just a cheap buzz, it’s perhaps the most complex cultural medium of the 20th century. Digital art is dominant now, not derivative.
So in a decade from now will we even be talking about “AI art” as some kind of distinct category? It may just be another current that runs through our visual, written, aural culture, indistinguishable from others. Our question is less about whether AI threatens art, so much as whether artists will have the agency to shape AI themselves.
That means working to ensure that the medium isn’t entirely captured by the corporate world. Locked behind subscriptions and policies. That’s a structural danger, not an aesthetic one. It would mean excluding artists from the medium and material of their era.
But if AI can be accessible, hackable, contextualized, then it’s another strand in the lineage of human creativity.
In closing
“Did AI make that?” is the wrong question. The right one is what can artists do with AI?
Art isn’t about purity of method. It’s about creating meaning and resonance, transformation. There’s no reason why AI should end that story, it can extend it. It’s another language in which art can be spoken, and a medium with which artists can wrestle in order to best express themselves.
The threat narrative is easy. New is scary. But there’s a more promising deeper, long-term, truth. AI doesn’t replace the artist. It further frees the fields of possibility.