Power to the People: Art, AI, and the Human Condition
By Aniya Anderson
March 23, 2026
We’re past the point of no return for AI.
Every time I interact with the apps on my phone—Pinterest, Instagram, YouTube—I prepare myself to be bombarded with fabricated content, all of them harboring the same unnaturally smooth appearance I’ve come to recognize.
A few months from now the machine will once again churn; water will pop levels will fall, sludge will enter the stream, and the person anxiously needing to decide what to eat for breakfast will receive their automatic answer. Water levels will fall, sludge will enter the stream.
But they won’t care. Their oracle has given them their command, and they will follow, like sheep, ignoring all the warning signs.
I know plenty of people who are trying to figure out the best way to deal with this all-consuming monster; it is ruining our planet, stealing our jobs, and altering our content. If NFTs weren’t bad enough, now we’re seeing AI music, art, and other short-form content. Most artists have already begun to boycott AI, and as more trickle in and realize just how serious this is, the larger reality is this: AI isn’t going anywhere.
Multi-million dollar companies are smitten with this new lucrative outlet, and where money is, that’s where they set up shop. As grim as this reality may seem for my fellow creatives, I still think that there is something that can be done. The entire world—especially users online—are currently exploring the idea of rebellion and reform. Every day the latest headlines are constantly alerting us of another way that we’re unsafe.
Not only is it proving just how little we’re being considered, but it’s pushing some of us to act in ways we haven’t before. On the other hand, so many people are victims to mass desensitization, frozen into inaction due to the frequent bombardment of news regarding the latest catastrophic decision.
I’m still learning to define and understand what it means to fight back and how to stay properly informed, but I know one thing for sure: art is power. Art created by real people– full of dissatisfaction and revolution–has cemented and represented significant portions of history, because people of the past had no choice but to let out their discontent somehow.
There was no instance of Artificial Intelligence wearing the skin of a real person; only real knuckles, real paint, and real ink telling the stories of millions.
Again, this is where the true power lies.
Discouraging news headlines about the latest AI development are beginning to convince some people of an invisible clock counting down before we finally start to live out the prophecy of the Nixon Age: flying cars and robots taking over the world. We’re seeing robots, and instead of flying cars we do have self-driving ones, but I don’t think we’re capable of being replaced.
Two things embody art: personal experience and community. Personal experience is innate—we cannot escape it. As defined by the philosophical concept of the human condition, we are universally linked by an interpersonal fabric that’s bound by things such as despair, birth, death, and conflict. This means that from the time we are born, we begin to accumulate experiences and stories that fall within these categories.
The life of a creative is set apart slightly because we have to find a way to repurpose our joy and our pain into something more permanent. We need something that we can come back to over and over again—landmark reminders of our individual bouts with the Human Condition.
As for the importance of community to creation, I can only pose a single question: what is the point of art if we don’t get to share it? Don’t misunderstand me now; I don’t mean this in the capitalist way where creation equals a dollar sign, but I do think that it might be a waste to hoard your talent from even a small corner of the world.
In one of the more nuanced definitions of the Human Condition, we’re often told that we are a social people who usually thrive within the company of others. With these universal experiences that unify us, the next step to that is finding someone to share them with.
The same goes for art. What makes our pieces so special and unique from AI slop is that we actually harbor perspectives that deserve to be shared. The beauty of art is that we can see the same underlying motif expressed in countless ways.
There are obviously more scholarly and academic definitions of the human condition, but I think these are the two most important things that we have to remember if we intend to fight against this new development of the Digital Age. We have to keep creating, and we have to keep building our community.
Even before AI quickly infiltrated, another pervasive issue reared its ugly head—art was only seen with a price tag on it. Your legitimacy as an artist was (and still is) quantified by how much you are loved, how much skill you have, and of course, how much money you can make. They teach us this young.When I was in middle school, I remember seeing how little money you were expected to make if you didn’t aim for a white-collar career.
The slightly pinched faces of teachers were always what got me. From the moment I expressed my interest in a creative career, I was met with the same look of regret that flashed across their faces. Then they told me something along the lines of “do whatever you want to do, but keep in mind that you’re going to have a hard time.”
By fourteen, I was already tortured by the thought of my own inadequacy, so hearing this was just the cherry on top. Luckily, it never deterred me, but as I progressed through school, I encountered many people who destroyed their dreams before they even had the chance to try.
If our dreams were already being crushed back then without AI, now the problem is even worse. So many people with work that deserves to be shared are stifling themselves because of the fear of AI, and hopelessness created by the capitalist standard. We are viewing each other as competition instead of a community, and this division is one of the biggest threats that we face.
AI is sent ahead of us, filling every channel, and we’re having to stomach the lie that it is somehow better than us, that we have nothing to offer. This isn’t true. Our rebellion is found in numbers and in our authenticity. If we relinquish our creativity into the hands of corporate billionaires they’ll do what they do best: trade true art for efficiency, and your soul for two cents.
