The Pendulum Swings
Artistic value has always been about narrative, not just the object itself. The current AI art anxiety follows a predictable historical rhythm.
Picture Jackson Pollock in 1950, standing over a canvas spread across his studio floor. He dips a stick into house paint—not even proper artist's pigments—and lets it drip as he moves. His whole body is in motion, dancing around the canvas, flicking paint in arcs and spirals. The result looks like controlled chaos, but it's undeniably his. The paint follows gravity, but Pollock guides where it falls.
Now imagine a different scene: a can of the same house paint suspended from the ceiling on a rope, swinging in slow arcs over an identical canvas. No human hand guides it. Just physics—gravity, momentum, pendulum motion. The paint drips as the can swings, creating spirals and intersecting lines that look remarkably like Pollock's work. Same aesthetic. Same visual impact. But no “artist”.
This isn't hypothetical. By the 1960s, artists and tinkerers were building exactly these kinds of contraptions. They saw the "system" embedded in Pollock's technique and mechanized it. Motors replaced body movement. Timers controlled paint release. What started as radical human expression became an algorithm of gravity and flow.
Here's the uncomfortable question: if both paintings move you equally, which one matters more?
The Same Argument, Again
The anxiety surrounding AI-generated art feels urgent and new, but the pattern is ancient. When photography emerged in the 1800s, painters declared it a mechanical fraud—no skill, no soul, just light hitting chemicals. When digital art arrived, traditionalists dismissed it as somehow less real than paint on canvas. Each time, the art world eventually shrugged and moved on, finding new ways to value what humans create.
The recent drama at DragonCon captures this perfectly. A vendor was escorted out by police after complaints revealed they were selling AI-generated images as original art. They'd applied with hand-painted pop culture pieces, then switched to selling AI work once approved. When confronted, the vendor became hostile: "You guys are sore because you don't sell sh*t and will be forever broke." The incident was celebrated online as "a victory for humans." But beneath the policy enforcement was deeper unease. If anyone can generate professional-looking illustrations in seconds, what happens to the idea of being an "artist"? The fear isn't just economic competition—it's the collapse of boundaries that once felt solid.
But those boundaries were never as solid as they seemed.
The Stories We Tell
Here's what really drives artistic value: not just the object, but the story around it. A Pollock painting commands millions not only because of how it looks, but because we know Pollock made it. We picture him in that studio, wrestling with his demons, channeling raw emotion into controlled chaos. The biography becomes part of the artwork. The myth inflates the price.
Remove that story, and you're left with... what, exactly? Attractive patterns of dried paint. The pendulum machine produces visually identical results, but without the narrative weight. No tortured genius, no revolutionary technique, no cultural moment. Just physics doing what physics does.
This isn't unique to painting. A director's value isn't in operating the camera—it's in the invisible choices that shape each scene. The way they guide an actor's delivery, frame a shot, build tension across two hours. These contributions are real, but they're also harder to quantify than physical brush strokes. They exist in the space between intention and interpretation.
What Changes
When people worry that AI will devalue human art, they're really worried about the stories breaking down. If a machine can mimic a painting style or generate a compelling image, then what makes human-created work special? The answer has always been the same: nothing inherent in the object itself.
The value was always constructed. Always fragile. Always dependent on collective agreement about what matters.
But here's the thing about these cycles of artistic disruption: they don't actually destroy value. They redistribute it. Photography didn't kill painting—it freed painters from the obligation to simply record reality. Digital tools didn't diminish illustration—they opened up new possibilities for visual expression. Each wave of technological change forces artists to find new ways to be irreplaceably human.
The current panic over AI art will follow the same pattern. Not because the technology isn't powerful—it is—but because human creativity has always been more flexible than any single definition of it.
The Pendulum Always Swings
What looks like controlled chaos from Pollock's studio becomes, over time, a recognizable system. What feels like revolutionary technology becomes, eventually, just another tool. What seems like an existential threat to human creativity becomes another chapter in the long story of how art adapts.
The pendulum painting and the Pollock may look identical, but we've collectively decided they exist in different categories, carry different meanings, inspire different responses. One we call "human expression"; the other gets labeled "mechanical reproduction." But both required human decisions. Both produce aesthetic experiences. Both are art—we just assign them different stories, and therefore different values.
The real illusion isn't that AI threatens artistic value. The real illusion is that artistic value was ever separate from the stories we choose to tell about it. Those stories will change, as they always have. The pendulum swings, gravity pulls the paint down, and somehow, we keep finding new ways to be amazed by the patterns that emerge.