By Arwin Shams Siddiquee

The year is 2026. Gemini can write your thesis. ChatGPT can be your therapist. Claude can write you a poem for your partner. Midjourney can paint you a portrait of your dead grandmother. Grok can crack jokes for your friends. I could even get some new model or another to write a nice, long essay for me right now criticizing AI as evil and destructive: I wouldn’t even have to do this little bit of writing. There exist tens of Large Language Models out there at this very moment that could be vastly more “efficient” sub-editors for MUSE than any one of us working here today. Every task you do, an AI model or LLM or some such could probably do it quicker, more “efficiently”. Every day that passes is a day that you need to interact with other people less and less. Every year, LLMs get better at doing your work, communicating with the people around you, and even performing hobbies for you. Your thinking, feeling, and understanding no longer need to be your own. So why bother?

Because you are human. Because the process of creating something is beautifully human.

Your thinking, feeling, and understanding define you as human. Interacting with other human beings–living alongside other people–makes human society work. You exist as you do because other human beings raised you, cared for you, taught you the things you know. You stand on the shoulders of giants (and so does AI, though the individuals and corporations that own the models are working quite hard to have you forget that), and those giants were just as human as you. There is inherent beauty in being human, and the ways in which we embody and express that beauty are in the things we create. This is, of course, not limited to traditionally creative works alone; while painting a picture or writing a novel or singing a song are certainly part of the beautifully human things we create, these are not all we have to embody our human-ness. The ways in which we communicate, the various works that we contribute to society (intellectual and physical labor alike), the choices we make on a daily basis are all reflections of our humanity.

Perhaps even more importantly, it isn’t just about the finished creation either. A major part of what makes creating something meaningful, beautiful, worthwhile is the journey of creating the thing itself. The value of a painting or a song or a poem isn’t wholly in the piece of art you get at the end of the creative process, it is also in the process itself. This is arguably the largest piece of the puzzle that artificial intelligence threatens to take away from us now. When ChatGPT writes you a story, all you get at the end is the story itself: you are deprived of the creative process and the joy that it brings. When Claude writes a paper for you, you are deprived of the learning and thinking that enriches your mind and person. Giving your creative process away to AI is giving away a crucial part of your human experience.

There is, of course, the argument that AI is a tool like any other, that automation exists to make tasks easier for humans, that AI has applications across several different fields where it allows for major developments to be made easier and faster than ever before. I don’t disagree. But AI usage cannot and must not take over the creative process entirely as it presently seeks to do. Automation, when applied to the menial, the rote, the inhumane, can be a godsend. AI can and should help make strides in several different fields as a tool used by and under human supervision, it can and should be used to make menial tasks easier for humans, but never at the cost of replacing, displacing, and making obsolete the very humans that it is designed to help. And it absolutely, categorically must not take over the process of creating art, music, literature, and more. Automation should ideally free up humans from doing menial, repetitive, dehumanizing work so that we might engage in creating art, fostering community, and doing the things that are uniquely human. As it stands today, however, LLMs and the corporations that own and run them are doing a very good job of replacing humans in the creative process while untold millions of us are still stuck doing the things that automation should have made obsolete years ago. That should probably clue you in to where their priorities lie (hint: it’s profit). But that’s a conversation for an entirely separate essay.