What does AI art say about us?
The world is a drop of dew.
A drop of dew it is indeed.
And yet, and yet…
— Kobayashi Issa, 1819
This is my favorite Haiku (roughly translated from Japanese). It might be the only Haiku that I have memorized. I think it’s beautiful, from the moment I first heard it over a decade ago.
Snail climbs the mountain—
one blade of grass at a time,
no need to hurry.
— ChatGPT 4o, 2025
ChatGPT can also write haiku. It wrote this particular haiku because I asked it to. Issa wrote “drop of dew” because his one-year-old daughter died.
The meaning, the significance, the emotion of his poem doesn’t exist on the page, in between the words. The meaning exists out in the world, in the emotion felt by Issa and everyone who’s read it in the 200 years since. If you didn’t know the poem, what did you think about it before I told you about why it exists? How do you feel now that you know?
With AI art, the question is always ‘why does this exist?’ It doesn’t exist to bring its AI creator joy (or any other feeling). Like any art form, if it inspires emotion—even negative emotions—it’s probably good art. Movies you hate with a passion because they got you feeling some type of way may or may not be fun movies, but they are probably good art.
I saw an AI-generated image of the cast of Harry Potter in the gym, absurdly buffed out a la Schwarzenegger in Pumping Iron. That’s a bizarre but fascinating piece of art. It stirred up some confusing and complex emotions in me. But it didn’t stir up any emotion in its creator, because AI doesn’t have emotion.
source: @tunguz
Maybe you could argue the creator was still the human who prompted it, and the AI was simply the tool. That’s a fair point.
My wife has a little pencil bag that says “MAKE BAD ART.” Everyone should make bad art. Because the point of art isn’t only when it’s “done”, the point isn’t only that it exists; the meaning is in the making. If you told me some dude spent 1,000 hours painstakingly shading each vein in Daniel Radcliffe’s bodacious forearms, that’s something. If you told me some dude spent 2.3 seconds typing out “Cast of Harry Potter as bodybuilders”, that’s something else completely. The meaning isn’t completely encapsulated in the artifact itself. You can’t separate the thing from the making.
A popular genre of social media posts is “The Great Transformation”: the before and after of a glow-up, a haircut, a home renovation. This genre glorifies the final outcome. As the viewer, we skip over everything that happened in the middle and cut straight to the end, which feeds our tiny attention spans more dopamine. AI art is symptomatic of this societal ill.
Eckhart Tolle, author of The Power of Now, talks about collective presence. Being present isn’t just something each of us can do to find inner peace. It’s something you can see on a macro scale. Just turn on the news—we are not very present. In fact, we seem to be pretty angry. To make AI art, you don’t have to be present for the journey. In a few keystrokes, you can skip to the end.
Using technology well means asking good questions. At the birth of social media, Facebook marketed itself as helping you “connect” with your friends. But what does it really mean to have a connection with someone? I think we can universally agree that the experience we get on social media is pretty different from feeling deeply connected with another human.
Maybe this is a call to action: feel things deeply, even if they’re not always pleasant. Make bad art. Appreciate the journey. Be present. Ask good questions. Hit the gym like Harry Potter.