Cover image: AI-generated, after the Dutch vanitas still-life tradition. AI can create — humans give meaning.
First, power machines relieved us of heavy physical labour. Now, with generative AI, intellectual work, text and images can be produced in an instant by thinking machines. Yet behind the celebration of productivity, an existential void is opening up. What remains of the human being when our silicon friends can think faster, more accurately – quite simply, better than we can?
“Medicine, law, business, engineering - these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love - these are what we stay alive for.” — John Keating (Robin Williams) in Dead Poets Society (1989).
Two currents in Western culture make us vulnerable. The first is our belief in progress: the idea that each generation should be better off than the last. Endless economic growth, driven by rising labour productivity. We have elevated efficiency into the highest good. We take pride in it.
The second is our overvaluation of the intellect. It began in 1637 with René Descartes' words: Cogito, ergo sum. The sense of self became increasingly lodged in the head - our headquarters, as it were. We see this in the financial rewards accorded to knowledge workers, and in education's emphasis on developing academic intelligence. We take pride in our capacity to think: it is who we are.
With the recent breakthrough of generative AI, then, we are being challenged on two fronts. The first is economic: the thinking machine undermines our value as productive beings. The second is existential: it erodes our supposed uniqueness as thinking beings. The very things on which we built both our idea of progress and our self-image - producing ever more efficiently and thinking ever better - can now be done better by a machine.
The chess world caught an early glimpse of this in 2017. DeepMind's AlphaZero was given only the rules of chess. No opening book, no games. Nada. It then played 44 million games against itself. In a single day. The system independently rediscovered almost the whole body of human chess knowledge. It also added new pages of its own. Ideas that top players initially thought simply could not work turned out to be extraordinarily powerful.
An intellectual culture in which generations of grandmasters had developed knowledge could be explored anew by a machine - and even extended. Within a single working day.
Generative AI carries that principle from the chessboard into almost every field of knowledge. Writing, summarising, programming, analysing, designing, legal reasoning, supporting diagnoses: for intellectual production, the human mind is no longer an automatic prerequisite.
That does not necessarily mean human beings are becoming redundant. It does mean that we need to ask ourselves a more uncomfortable question. If our value can no longer be taken for granted on the basis of what we are able to produce, where does that value lie?
This is not simply a story of loss, but a cultural task: we have to reinvent ourselves. Education, enterprise and philosophy will each have a role to play. Education must reconsider what formation means when knowledge is abundantly available. Enterprise must learn to create value without reducing people to the residual category of automation. Philosophy must sharpen the concepts through which we speak about intelligence, autonomy and dignity.
But it is the arts, in particular, that have a special role as guides in periods of transition.
Not because art is a safe domain into which machines cannot intrude. That idea is already obsolete. Generative systems write poems, compose music and create images that can be technically convincing. That is precisely what makes art interesting: it forces us to examine the distinction between producing and signifying, between form and experience, between an outcome and a lived perspective.
Historically, this is not an unfamiliar movement. Industrialisation brought not only machines, but also a cultural counter-question about nature, feeling and inwardness. Photography deprived painting of its monopoly on visible reality, yet in doing so compelled painters to investigate perception, colour, abstraction and subjectivity more radically. Whenever technology takes over a human capability, art shifts the question from what we can do to what something means to us.
That is also where the relevance of the Human After All Prize lies. The strength of such a prize is not in defending some final, exclusively human preserve. More interesting is its exploration of the borderland where human and machine meet. Its motto, 'AI can create. Humans give meaning', is therefore less a reassurance than a hypothesis to be tested. Meaning, too, is no simple, inviolable possession: it arises within culture, relationships, memories and embodied experience, and it changes with the instruments we use.
That is precisely why we need artists. Not to keep AI outside the door, but to make visible what changes when intelligence becomes detached from experience. An algorithm can render grief in stylistically convincing language without ever mourning; it can write a love letter without knowing desire. That distinction is philosophically difficult to pin down, but artistically it can be felt at once. Art cannot resolve the tension, but it can intensify it.
Perhaps that is art's most important function in the age of AI: not to prove that human beings are better than machines, but to prevent us from defining humanity solely in terms on which machines can defeat us. If productivity and intellectual output no longer suffice as the foundations of our self-image, we must learn to value other registers again: experience, imagination, vulnerability, embodiment, beauty and connectedness.
The rise of AI is therefore not only a technological upheaval, but also an invitation to cultural self-knowledge. The question is not how we make the machine more human. The more interesting question is what its arrival forces us to rediscover about ourselves. That is precisely why, in this uncertain age, we need the arts.