The Rise of AI Feels Like the End of Art - But So Did Photography, and Painters Survived

It's easy to feel like we're living through a once-in-history crisis. AI is coming for everything: art, writing, music, code, maybe even your grandma's chili recipe. And everyone is scrambling to figure out what's left for humans to do when the machines can do it faster, cheaper, and maybe even better. But, plot twist - it's not the first time creatives have faced this existential meltdown.

Let me take you back to the eighteen hundreds. Enter the camera.

When photography rolled onto the scene, painters had what I like to call their 'ChatGPT moment'. For centuries, painting had one main job: show us the world. Capture a face. Preserve a sunset. Immortalize the grandeur of a horse in mid-gallop. And then, bam, this weird box shows up that can do all of that in a fraction of the time, with insane precision. It was over, right? Pack up your brushes, painters. You're obsolete.

Except… that's not what happened.

Faced with this terrifying new reality, painters didn't quit. They pivoted. If they couldn't out-real the camera, they'd out-feel it. Thus, Impressionism was born. Monet, Renoir, Van Gogh, Cézanne - they stopped trying to paint what they saw and started painting what they felt. Suddenly, brush strokes got messy. Colors got weird. Perspectives got all kinds of funky. They leaned into subjectivity, into emotion, into chaos. Stuff the camera couldn't - and still can't - capture.

That's the part that I think most people forget. The camera didn't kill painting. It forced painting to level up, to evolve into something the camera couldn't do.

And now, here we are again.

AI can already make art that looks like it was made by humans. It can write in the style of any author. It can generate music in any genre. It can take your voice and make it say things you've never said. It's basically the camera all over again, only this time it's everywhere and doing everything.

So, here's the uncomfortable question I've been sitting with: What's our Impressionism moment?

If AI can do art, literature, photography, music, video - what's the thing it can't do? What's the new way of expressing ourselves that will make all this old stuff feel, well, old? Before the camera perfected capturing reality, nobody had ever thought of Impressionism. It wasn't like painters said, "Okay, time to invent Impressionism." It emerged organically from the chaos. From necessity. From frustration. The Fear of being replaced.

That's the part that makes me excited, weirdly enough. We don't know what it is yet. But something new will come. It always does. Humans are annoyingly good at that.

Maybe it'll be ultra-personal, ephemeral, tactile experiences that no machine can replicate. Maybe it'll be something completely outside the realm of screens and pixels. Maybe it'll be something we can't even begin to imagine yet because it doesn't exist.

Whatever it is, I'm pretty sure it'll be messy. And imperfect. And human.

And that's kind of beautiful.