#### image: realvjy You’re scrolling late at night and you stop on a piece of art. It’s the kind of image that makes your thumb pause. The lighting feels deliberate. The composition is just great. The details pull you in just long enough to wake up that familiar feeling, the one that says: I want to know how this was made. So you open the comments, expecting the usual things people used to ask:
***What inspired it?
How long did it take?
What did you struggle with?*** Instead, the top comment reads: ***AI Generated
What prompt did you use?
What AI tool did you use?*** And something small but important collapses. Not because the question is evil. Not because tools are forbidden. But because it reveals how we’ve been trained to look at art now. We don’t meet it with curiosity anymore. We meet it like a shortcut. And once you notice that shift, you start seeing it everywhere. ## The shift happened quietly We’re living in an era where a lot of what we see online is made with AI, or at least shaped by it. That fact alone isn’t the problem. Every generation gets new tools. Artists have always adopted them. What feels different this time is the culture that formed around it. The loudest people talking about “creativity” often sound like they’re cheering for the automation of it. They call it democratization. They say it removes barriers. They say it gives everyone a voice. In theory, that sounds beautiful. In practice, what I’m watching on my feed looks more like an endless stream of output, piling up so fast that it buries the very thing it claims to support. Human-made work gets harder to spot. Originality becomes harder to trust. Even skill starts to feel suspicious. The default reaction to something impressive isn’t ***“wow.”*** It’s ***“how do I reproduce this?”*** ## When the question becomes extraction, something breaks You can feel it in the comment sections.
A lot of people don’t want to understand the work. They want to obtain the formula. Prompt culture turns art into a recipe and the artist into a vending machine. ***“What model?”
“Which tool?”
“Share workflow.”
“Drop prompt.”*** Not “teach me how you got the idea” but “give me story behind it.” And the blur spreads from there. When everything can be generated, everything starts to be treated like it was generated. Even human artists get interrogated like they’re hiding something. The work becomes less about expression and more about proof. ***“Proof that it’s real.”
”Proof that it took effort.”
”Proof that you didn’t cheat.”*** That’s an exhausting place for art to live. ## I still remember my own 3D days I’d finish a render, feel excited for two minutes, then immediately start seeing everything that was wrong with it. I’d duplicate the file 20 times. Change the lighting. Adjust the materials. Nudge the camera by a few degrees. Render again. Hate it. Render again. Repeat. Sometimes I’d spend a full week tweaking one piece before I shared the final result. And here’s the part that hurts in a very specific way: if I post those same kinds of pieces today, I’ll often get comments like “AI generated.” Not critique. Not questions. Just a label. Suddenly the work isn’t seen as effort. It’s seen as suspicion. And the weird thing is, it puts you in a position where you feel like you have to prove you made it yourself. Like you owe the internet a behind-the-scenes documentary just to be believed.

#### image: realvjy ## I don’t engage with most negativity, but this is different I genuinely don’t care much about random negativity. People will always project. Jealousy, insecurity, boredom, whatever. I usually don’t engage unless it’s necessary. But the ***“AI generated”*** accusation is different. Not because my ego can’t handle it, but because it doesn’t stop at me. It reshapes the entire culture around art. It teaches people to stop asking meaningful questions like “what were you trying to do here?” and start asking extraction questions like “how do I generate this?” It turns artists into toolbars instead of humans. And if you’re an artist trying to find your voice, that shift matters. ## The false comparison people keep making Someone generates a five-second cinematic clip and posts: “I made this in 5 minutes. Why does Disney or WB need $200 million and years?” It sounds clever until you sit with it for a moment. That’s not a fair comparison. It’s not apples to oranges. It’s more like comparing a rock to alive tree. One is a single output that looks good in isolation. The other is an entire system of decisions: writing, pacing, sound, editing, performance, direction, emotion, and story. It’s cohesion. It’s responsibility. It’s taste at scale. A generated clip can be impressive. That doesn’t make it equivalent. ## Businesses will always love cheap and fast Of course businesses are excited. Cheap and fast wins in business almost every time. If a company can generate 100 options in a day, many will. If they can reduce costs, they’ll try. That part is predictable. What isn’t predictable is how quickly we started treating cost-efficiency like it proves artistic value. Just because something can be made in seconds doesn’t mean it carries the same weight as something built slowly, deliberately, with taste that took years to develop. Speed can produce results. But speed doesn’t automatically produce meaning. ## The slop era isn’t about bad content, it’s about endless content Not all AI work is bad. Some of it is genuinely stunning. But when creation becomes effortless at scale, volume takes over the culture. The feed fills up. The algorithm rewards repetition. The internet becomes a factory that produces “good enough” faster than taste can keep up. And slowly, we get numb. We start treating art like wallpaper. ***Nice. Disposable. Replaceable.*** The biggest loss isn’t only jobs. It’s taste. Because taste needs time. It needs contrast. It needs real attention. It needs the ability to sit with something long enough to feel the human choices inside it. ## A quieter choice The algorithm will keep rewarding noise. That’s not changing soon. But as viewers, readers, and creators, we still have a choice in how we respond. ***We can value process over prompts.
We can look for friction behind the work.
We can support people, not just output.
We can stop confusing “I can generate it” with “I understand it.”*** --- I’ve been carrying this thought in my draft for a while. I went back and forth on whether to post it, but I finally sat down, finished the edits, and here we are. After everything, I really believe that valuing the human touch is a kind of quiet rebellion. It isn’t loud. It isn’t trendy. It’s just intentional. Because at the end of the day, I’d rather sit with one imperfect creation made by human hands than scroll past a hundred flawless images that leave nothing behind. I will always choose spending hours creating a single piece of art myself over generating a quick prompt. I love the feeling of doing things by hand, no matter how long it takes. It’s all worth it if it resonates with you. Orignall shared on substack

How AI Art Are Slowly Destroying the Value of Real Art

Feb 23, 2026 · 6 min read

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-Steve Jobs