Many live in quiet fear that AI will someday be, if not the death of art itself, then at least of the human artist’s livelihood. Between Hollywood screenwriters taking to the streets to protect their jobs from large language models and robot artists like Ai-Da fetching millions at auction, the future of art can seem rather grim. 

Fortunately, the annals of art history paint a different, brighter picture. Viewed from a distance, the pressure AI exerts on human artists appears as part of an evolutionary process that far predates its own invention. Throughout history, technological innovation, by extending and facilitating our capacity to create, has shifted attention from form to content: from what the finished product looks like towards how and why it is made. 

Following this trend, we can expect AI to push artists to be less perfect and more human, and for their art to get better by becoming “worse.”

To be sure, AI is not the first technology to face the accusation that it will ruin art forever. When photography emerged in the nineteenth century, painters feared the worst. In 1840, after seeing a photograph for the first time, the French painter Paul Delaroche famously declared, “From today, painting is dead!” 

In truth, the camera didn’t kill painting so much as force it to evolve, ushering in an era of unprecedented creativity and experimentation. Movements like Impressionism, Fauvism, and Cubism all arose in part from painters asking the same question: What can I do that this new machine cannot? The answer, broadly, was to represent the........

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