There was a time when creation was slow.
When every idea had to beg for a name,
every story waited at the threshold of approval.
You needed a handshake, a smile,
a stack of money tall enough to cast a shadow,
and some suit who decided if you were good enough.
The hands that shaped the work belonged to many,
and the work was always almost undone.
But now—
a machine hums in the corner, spitting words
like a broken jukebox playing a song
half-remembered from a dream.
It works without coffee, without sleep,
without a broken heart to slow it down.
A single artist can lift a world from silence.
A poet can summon verses that drift
like mist over a sleeping city.
A filmmaker can dream a scene
and watch it unspool like ribbon in the dark.
The barriers have thinned. The wait has ended.
AI stands at the edge of the field,
not with answers, but with questions.
We step toward it, hesitant, curious.
And then the first words appear.
AI isn’t an oracle.
It’s not a hammer, nor a brush.
It’s a flicker in static,
a mirror held up to your mind—
showing all the strange angles
you didn’t know were there,
then asking: Is this what you meant?
Sometimes it’s a trick of the light—
words reflecting words,
images reflecting images,
a shimmer in the water
that vanishes when touched.
Other times, it’s a door opening,
a hallway you didn’t know was there.
To work with it is to move through uncertainty.
It offers a sentence; you erase it.
It suggests a form; you bend it into something else.
Back and forth, a dance of offering and refusal,
of shape and reshape.
Until at last, the thing before you is yours.
If a machine suggests a word,
and you pick it—
is it yours?
If it sketches a skyline,
and you move the buildings around,
who gets the credit
when someone stares at it and says,
“Damn, that’s beautiful”?
Who owns a shadow?
Who claims the breeze
that moves through an empty room?
If you put in the hours,
if you sit there sweating over every line,
if you rip it apart and build it back up,
it’s yours.
The artist leads.
The artist decides.
The artist knows when the thing is finished.
Call AI your assistant,
your collaborator,
your really weird parrot—
it doesn’t matter.
What matters is that you did the work.
Or you didn’t.
And the work will always know.
Some say AI steals.
That it sifts through the voices of the past
and wears them like a borrowed coat.
But creation is not a well that empties.
It’s a river that widens,
carrying and gathering all the more.
Have you ever seen a field after a flood?
Flowers everywhere, all at once,
like the Earth had too many ideas
and decided to write them all down at the same time.
That’s what’s happening with art.
AI isn’t siphoning creativity
out of the atmosphere like a black hole
that only eats good ideas.
It’s throwing gas on a fire
that was already burning.
And the only difference now—
there’s a hell of a lot more fire.
But let’s be real.
Not all art is gold.
Most of everything is bad.
Most novels are bad.
Most poems are bad.
Most paintings look like something
a blindfolded gorilla made in three minutes.
And AI?
AI can make it worse.
Or just make more of everything
than anyone could care about.
Because AI does not feel the weight of what it makes.
It does not wake in the night
with a sentence burning behind its teeth.
It doesn’t know the pull of memory,
the ache of unfinished thought.
It can spit out words, sure.
It can paint.
It’ll hum a melody
like a half-drunk keyboard player
stuck in the 80s.
But it can’t tell you what’s worth keeping.
That’s up to us.
That’s why we’re needed.
Because the good stuff—
you can tell.
You’ll feel it in your gut.
It’s the one that looks like
it’s been through the wringer,
the one somebody fought for.
That they lost sleep over.
You’ll see it, and you’ll just know.
The best AI art:
• Has intent.
• Gets revised, and revised again.
• Comes from lived experience.
If you’re just rolling dice
and hoping for something pretty,
don’t call yourself an artist.
Call yourself a gambler.
Either way, AI is here.
And people will go on arguing about it.
They’ll write think pieces,
shake a fist at the sky,
shout about what’s fake and what’s real,
what’s stolen or earned.
Meanwhile, artists will go on making things.
Machines will keep talking back.
And they will get better,
blurring the lines between artist and tool.
But here’s the heart of the thing—
the part that trembles
when the work is good,
when it’s right—
that will always belong to us.
So if you’re curious, dive in.
Mess around.
Make something with your bare hands.
And sometimes let the machine surprise you—
If it spits out something strange,
something beautiful,
something that makes you stop and say,
“Wait—where did that come from?”
You’ll know what to do.
And in the hush before the first word appears,
we are still the ones who hold the pen.
Created by a human with AI assistance.
© Subcreation.design 2025. All rights reserved.
