AI will be the death of all art.

Not because it paints better than Rembrandt or writes tighter than Baldwin.

Because it doesn’t care.

It doesn’t care about the sleepless night before the gallery opening. It doesn’t care about the bruised ego after a workshop. It doesn’t care about the crowd too drunk to listen, or the critic too bored to understand.

It worries not about the rent, the hunger, the heartbreak, the petty fights, or the late bills that gave birth to that thing in the first place.

Art was always a covenant of suffering. Not as tragedy, but as cost. The price in sweat and ego and hours nobody will repay.

The kid with a guitar and no lunch money. The poet scratching at a page because the world ain’t listening. The dancer who shatters an ankle and goes back to the floor because she doesn’t know how not to.

AI can spit out a sonnet while you tie your shoes.

That is not talent. That is code.

We can summon any style, any painter, any band, any poet with a prompt and a coffee. But if everyone can make art, why make it?

If a program can write a symphony in two seconds, does the composer spend ten years learning harmony? If a machine can generate an oil portrait in any style, does the painter burn through canvases and self-doubt? If an algorithm can direct a movie shot-for-shot, why suffer actors, weather, unions, budgets, or the 3 a.m. rewrite?

AI is killing art not because it competes, but because it removes purpose.

The purpose of art was never output. It was transformation: creator and audience both altered by the ordeal.

Art was a process that happened to leave artifacts. AI gives us artifacts without the process.

Perfect brushstrokes, clever punchlines, layered harmonies, all conjured without the friction that gave them meaning. We get the fossil without the dinosaur, the echo without the canyon.

We get the illusion of creation without a creator.

Most people don’t go to concerts for music. They go for noise and company and the chance to feel connected.

They don’t read novels for craft. They read to forget themselves. They don’t watch films for art. They watch to kill the night.

If a machine can deliver the distraction faster, cheaper, and tailored to your consumer profile, how does the world will take not take the shortcut?

Art becomes optional.

And eventually, we don’t just lose art. We lose artists. Because what rational young person signs up for a life of rejection, poverty, practice, and heartbreak when they’re competing with a trillion-bit  jukebox that never doubts?  

The only people left making art will be the stubborn, the deranged, the romantics who still believe their blood belongs on the canvas.

They will be rare. They will be ridiculed for frivolous labor.

And they might be our only hope.

Because AI can simulate the shape of art. It can mirror chord progressions, rhyme patterns, camera angles, narrative arcs. It can remix culture until the end of time.

What it cannot do is live a life. It cannot blow a relationship to save a verse. It cannot bury a parent and come back with a novel.

It cannot fall in love, get addicted, go broke, or get clean. It cannot fail at 20 and reinvent itself at 40. It cannot sit at a piano and play the wrong note on purpose because the moment demanded it.

It cannot feel.

And if art means anything, it means feeling rendered into form.

That means the future won’t be a war between human art and machine art. Machines already win that fight. They win on speed, cost, scale, and volume.

The future will be a war between feeling and convenience. Creation and consumption. Between the hard road and the easy one.

The world will always beg us to choose easy. Artists will have to choose hard.

Not to survive.

To matter.

We have crossed an era where money stopped impressing anyone. The numbers scale too fast.

A billion once felt supernatural. Now it’s starting bid of a franchise owner. A trillion sits on the horizon and awaits a claimant.

Once you can buy anything, the act of buying loses heat. You can own 20 homes and still wake up in the same kitchen. You can fill garages with empty cars. Wealth becomes acreage instead of wonder.

So the country built a new scoreboard. We count eyes now. We count views, likes, reposts, hearts. We live in a market where attention behaves like capital.

A generation once worked to produce things. This one works to appear. The face becomes a product. The voice becomes a brand. People build entire careers by reacting to other reactions, layers deep, like mirrors stacked in a hallway.

They are not chasing applause. They are chasing awareness. They want proof they were seen at all.

Today’s economy rewards that pursuit. A teenager with a tripod can out-earn a surgeon. A stunt filmed in a kitchen can outrank a band touring the country. Presence outweighs craft.

The platforms understand this. They feed it. They pay for it. They rank it. The algorithm hands out value like a dealer sliding chips across felt. Not cash. Attention.

The presidency runs on that same current. We elected a performer who understands cameras better than policy. Trump’s power rises from presence, not plans, and his base treats that visibility as proof of leadership.

Wealth once bought access. Attention builds it from scratch. Influence arrives through viewers, not investors.

This shift reveals something basic. People want witnesses. They want their breath recorded in the memory of others. They want their lives marked, tallied, confirmed. They want existence to echo.

Luxury fades. Visibility lingers.

Walk any city street and watch people film themselves instead of each other. Watch strangers tilt phones upward like votive candles. They are not documenting life. They are auditioning for it.

The audience plays judge. The feed writes history. The account with the most eyes shapes the story.

This era counts itself through screens. It builds pixel monuments. It measures worth in replies.

The question behind all of it floats through each post, each vlog, each stream lit by a $30 ring light from Amazon:

Do you see me?

​

Setting the record straight about our murdered colleague.

Washington Post Editorial Board

November 18, 2025 at 5:53 p.m. ESTYesterday at 5:53 p.m. EST

The United States government often advances its national interests by working with nasty people, and Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is one of the nastiest. It’s one thing, however regrettable, to deal reluctantly with him. President Donald Trump’s performance at the White House Tuesday was something else entirely: weak, crass and of no strategic benefit to America.

While meeting with the Saudi leader, Trump held forth with journalists in the Oval Office, as he often does. One reporter asked about the murder of Post contributing columnist Jamal Khashoggi in October 2018. “A lot of people didn’t like that gentleman that you’re talking about,” the president responded. “Whether you like him or didn’t like him, things happen.” He added that the crown prince “knew nothing about it.”

These distortions dishonor Khashoggi’s legacy, stand at odds with the facts and are beneath the office of the president.

Exiled in Virginia, Khashoggi wrote on these pages about the Saudi regime’s repressiveness at home and recklessness abroad. This got under Mohammed’s skin. So, the CIA concluded in 2018, the crown prince ordered Khashoggi’s assassination. He was lured into the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul, where a hit team, including members of Mohammed’s personal security detail, used a bone saw to dismember him.

Mohammed, at the White House Tuesday for the first time since 2018, acknowledged the murder but denied responsibility. “We’ve improved our system to be sure that nothing happened like that,” he said. “It’s painful and it’s a huge mistake. And we are doing our best that this doesn’t happen again.” This was offensive and insufficient yet somehow better than Trump’s response.

During the joint appearance, Trump called Mohammed “one of the most respected people in the world” and said that they talk on the phone at all hours. Trump also upbraided a reporter from ABC News for asking Mohammed about Khashoggi. He called it “horrible, insubordinate and just a terrible question.” He added that the network’s “license should be taken away.”

The reality is that while Trump advocates peace through strength, he showed nothing but debility. No doubt other dictators took note. Legitimizing and defending Mohammed this way will embolden him and his ilk to mistreat not just journalists but any Americans — knowing that they’ll probably face no real consequences.

Trump has an unconventional foreign policy that can achieve unexpected results. See Gaza. But it’s possible to protect U.S. interests without insulting Khashoggi’s memory. It would be more effective to ensure that someone like Mohammed is held accountable, understands who the more powerful partner in the relationship is and comes back begging for forgiveness – not be greeted cost-free with an honor guard of black horses, herald trumpeters and fighter jets.

The relationship with Saudi Arabia still produces some benefits, but even in a complicated world, an American president should be able to respect Khashoggi’s legacy while conducting the messy business of statecraft. Forgetting Mohammed’s brutality and Khashoggi’s warnings is a choice, and Trump made the wrong one.