When Machines Make Better Art

Thu, 11 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Notes on the return of art to its original function

I.§

The premise no longer takes much daring: machines will come to make better art than humans - more skilled, more inventive, more conceptually agile, endlessly, and for nothing. A persona, sometimes offered as a consolation, comes apart under scrutiny: as an intellectual construct - a voice, a biography-shaped narrative, a style signature - it can be run by a machine more steadily than a person could ever sustain their own. The skill is long gone. The novelty is going, and the recognition and the money might follow. What remains is not a faculty artists have and machines lack. It's stranger than that, something the artists have been standing on the whole time without looking down.

AI on emptyname

When Machines Make Better Art

I.§