Disclaimers:

1. I’m not an AI dissident. I use AI every day for various tasks and would like to learn to use it more effectively.
2. I understand that AI democratizes content creation.
3. I’m consciously setting aside questions of copyright and authorship—for now, that’s beyond the scope of what I want to discuss.

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If you follow AI development, you’re probably familiar with the feeling of news oversaturation. Every day brings new models, tools, demos. Every day we can create content faster and cooler. I’m amazed. On one hand.

On the other hand, every day I think: humanity doesn’t seem to have a content shortage problem—there’s already more than anyone could ever consume. Why do we even need tools to accelerate its creation? Now I can create dozens of cool images, several videos, and tons of text in a day, but will anyone see them?

Perhaps I shouldn’t care whether anyone sees them if I’m creating for myself, and what matters is the result, not the process. But then the value lies in the process itself—in transforming my experience into a work of art, in living through it, in working with the material and its resistance (the stubbornness of words, the search for the right form), whatever it might be. Do I want to hand this over to AI? Won’t this impoverish the very act of creation?

On the other hand, maybe the process doesn’t matter to me, and only communication matters—getting the idea across. Here, AI is indeed a game-changer, allowing us to create messages quickly and effectively. But we return to the question: who will hear my message when there are millions of messages around? Why should anyone listen to mine specifically? What makes it different from others?

Perhaps this reveals a fork in the road: individual creativity vs. creative industries. The first type of creativity is individual to the creator’s personality, while the second is, at its limit, individual to the consumer’s personality. It no longer seems like science fiction that soon I’ll be able to watch a film created just for me, one that I’ll definitely like.

But I have another question: who will I discuss this film with? Will I be able to share this experience with someone? Isn’t shared experience one of the key properties of cultural artifacts?

And the next question: when I engage with a cultural artifact created by a human, I share the creator’s experience. In a work entirely created by AI specifically for me, there is no such creator. Who am I sharing this experience with? Only myself. Moreover, it seems this work will be like a regurgitation of my own experience. This doesn’t mean it won’t move me, but won’t the walls of my bubble just get thicker? Will something new happen within me if everything I consume is made from myself? It’s like masturbation—which isn’t bad, but it’s a completely different experience from interacting with another person.

This is, of course, an exaggeration. Modern recommendation systems are based on my taste but still bring me something new and expand my experience, and nothing prevents using this same approach with ultra-personalized content.

But I don’t think this negates my fundamental questions. And I’m not asking them to call for resistance to using AI for creativity—that would be like calling for resistance to using the internet. But I think it’s important to ask them. And it seems important to be aware of the spectrum from art as an act of self-discovery to ultra-personalized content for pure consumption.