AI X Creativity 2025

If AI is able to suddenly pump slop into our environment it’s only because we already turned on the faucets ourselves.

This is Vibe Theory: an expression of elite anxiety masquerading as a politics of resistance. It is also exemplary of what the tragic ur-European philosopher Walter Benjamin once called the “aestheticization of politics,” which in this case is the result of the odd incentives that ensue when the art world makes the invitations, pays the speaker... See more

“I’ve used ChatGPT a handful of times,” writes Hsu, “and on one occasion it accomplished a scheduling task so quickly that I began to understand the intoxication of hyper-efficiency.”

Yet as Gavin Mueller writes in Breaking Things at Work , Luddism—born as a revolt by artisan weavers against their proletarianization by manufacturing capital—was far from “a simple technophobia.” The Luddite rebellion, he notes, “was not against machines in themselves, but against the industrial society... of which machines were the chief weapon.”

A number of recent studies, while small in scale, have suggested that we grieve the loss of friction that comes from skipping over time-intensive or frustrating tasks, particularly in creative scenarios.

Crawford’s concluding remark on this panel was that Europe has a clear choice when it comes to AI: to passively acquiesce to American techbro hegemony or to actively refuse AI. As she put it bluntly, accept or fight!

The move-fast ethos that works for software deployment is potentially catastrophic when applied to human cognitive development. You can’t A/B test your way out of atrophy. You can’t pivot when you realise you’ve lost a generation of expertise.