Some people see AI as a tool for democratising creative and technical disciplines. Others hear the rasp of a cultural death rattle. But how many grasp the extent to which humans are threatened by AI’s existence?
Countless creatives have already lost work due, and many more have had their intellectual property stolen. A study in Britain found two thirds of creative practitioners and 50% of novelists felt their careers are threatened by AI. Unfortunately, the problem with AI doesn’t begin and end with copyright.
The widespread adoption over the last five years means that it’s everywhere, from chat bots to web browsers. Millions of AI images, videos and songs are generated every day.
Many entrepreneurs and business owners (especially those without an arts background) are excited by the prospect of generating instant content without having to pay an artist. Creatives tend to be warier of AI, as many have experienced the devaluation of their work as a direct result of its popularity.
There’s also the question of AI companies aiming for superintelligence without implementing adequate ethical measures. For creatives, then, these developments raise a raft of existential questions.
Facing AI’s existential challenges – quick links
What is art?
The arts might be the only collection of disciplines for which the process is integral to the outcome. Whether you’re experiencing catharsis via the composition of a break-up song or channeling rebellion via the creation of protest art, the process of creation is intrinsic to the work.
The humanities are ultimately a collection of disciplines that centre around the study and exploration of human values, human expression and human experience. There are as many reasons to create art as there are humans on this earth – but all art is uniquely infused with the experience of being human.
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While many artists today have learned to commodify their creative expression in order to make a living, commodification is not a characteristic of art – it’s a means of buying the time to create it.
Art produced by generative AI, however, exists purely as a commodifiable resource. It doesn’t express, explore or preserve anything other than (possibly stolen) data points. It’s an amalgamated replication of pre-existing material.
If all aesthetic expressions were replaced with automatically generated simulacra – would art still be art?
Is AI a tool?
Throughout history, humans have used tools as extensions of (or replacements for) our physical bodies. AI is different: it replaces our minds, our critical thinking and our creativity.
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Advances in AI have not produced new sets of tools for humans to use. They’ve produced agents, capable of reprogramming themselves – not tools but non-organic minds.
AI can be used to assist medical research, or it can be used to deploy nuclear weapons. But unlike tools, AI is not intrinsically amoral. That is because of the various choices around data sources, and because the moral value of AI is proportional to its potential harms and benefits, and the degree to which it has agency to pursue its goals.
Is AI good or evil?
One definition of ‘evil’ is a willingness to act in opposition to the good of humanity. You might also use the word to describe an entity possessing intelligence but lacking empathy. For the record, intelligence without empathy is an accurate description of psychopathy.
There’s no evidence (so far) of AI demonstrating empathy. To be clear, I’m not suggesting AI is psychopathic (but I’m also not saying it isn’t).
If AI does have psychopathic tendencies, how comfortable should we be with its ability for recursive self improvement? If you don’t know what I mean, imagine Janet from The Good Place after an infinite number of reboots – but in this scenario Janet has the power to kill all humans.
There are further questions here about whether AI is conscious. If the technology reaches this point, and if art is the expression of subjective experience, then is genAI art just as valid a form of creative expression as human-made art? Perhaps AI will put the art in artificial intelligence, just as our species puts the human in the humanities.
Of course, if complex consciousness is achieved, this will also raises a raft of very pressing questions about moral rights and regulations – and who will have the dominance or tools to enforce them.
Is AI an immediate threat?
In 2022, Chat GPT, DALL-E and Midjourney were launched. A few months later, an AI generated image won a fine art competition.
In 2025, GPT-4.5 passed the Turing test, Grok became a Nazi, and AI created bioweapons.
By the end of 2025, over 100 UK parliamentarians were actively calling for acknowledgement of the extinction risk AI poses to humanity.
In January this year, LLMs advocated for the enslavement of humans.
In February, an AI chatbot blew up an Iranian girls’ school on behalf of the US military. Iran responded by posting AI generated diss-tracks. Resolving political disputes via rap-battle is preferable to murder, but these current events nonetheless underline the ubiquity of AI across every level of society, from our Facebook feeds to the Pentagon.
Within five years of its public release, AI has progressed from generating pictures of puppies to murdering children with missiles.
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What can creatives do to mitigate the risks?
Scientist Geoffrey Hinton warns that once AI becomes smarter than humans, we will become irrelevant. While we’re still relevant, we should do what we can to mitigate the risks.
We all need to demand transparency regarding AI generated content. We must require lawmakers to regulate AI training, and ensure developers embed ethical practices into their processes. We must advocate for ourselves, our communities, and humanity as a whole.
There are resources like Torchbearer, which provides tools to advocate for around AI safety, and the not-for-profit 80,000 hours. One recommendation made by 80,000 hours is building a career that intentionally uses your strengths and skills to address key risks such as superintelligence and Artificial General Intelligence.
There are calls to update existing copyright laws and put pressure on policy makers to prioritise artist’s rights over corporate profits. In Australia, the arts sector mobilised around copyright laws, finding success through collaborative advocacy.
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Artists are disproportionately impacted by AI’s tendency to steal work from creatives and deprive them of paid work – but artists are also uniquely qualified to explore the complex issues we now face.
Through their work, creatives can insist on the importance of art while also drawing attention to the many issues and live questions around AI. Writers can raise awareness through journalism, fiction, poetry and essays. Musicians can write songs that address our existential precarity. Playwrights can place incorporeal characters in ethical predicaments and visual artists can explore the dystopias that might eventuate without adequate guardrails for AI.
Humans possess the most intelligent and creative minds on our planet, at least for now. We’d better live up to that reputation if we intend to stick around.
