The Artists Resistance: Holding the Line for Humanness

There is a difference. A quiet, undeniable difference.

A painting – formed through intention, feeling, and human perception – carries something real. It is something you can trust, something that is true.

An AI-generated image may look the same. It may borrow the colours and textures of great works that came before. But it holds nothing. It is an echo, not a voice. A mirror without depth. It has never hesitated before the first mark, never returned to a piece days later, seeing something new, feeling a pull to move in a new direction. It has never questioned itself, found a new perspective, a new clarity upon waking and started over feeling a truthful guidance emerging.

The difference is already clear, but as AI-generated art becomes more widespread, the presence of real human work will only become rarer – and more precious.

Ray Kurzweil, Director of Engineering at Google, predicts that by the 2030s, humans will become hybrids – part biological, part machine. Nanobots in our brains, linking us directly to AI, streamlining thought, eliminating inefficiencies.

But who defines inefficiency? What is lost in that optimisation? What happens when love, forgiveness, imagination, and creativity – the very essence of humanness – are treated as secondary to logic, speed, and automation?

Because when we lose those, we are vulnerable to power, control, and other people’s ideas. The transhumanist movement risks this. Artists help to remind us of our humanness. Real art, created by a human heart and hand, is an anchor in our environment.

We are a soft technology – breath, focus, movement, thought, emotion, nourishment. We do not process information as a system does; we are far more sophisticated than that – as we live, we feel, we experience. AI is a hard technology – pattern recognition, automation, optimisation. It is logic, stripped of presence or feeling. And yet, we are being told that efficiency is progress, that to hesitate, to struggle, to create with uncertainty is a flaw to be corrected.

But art is not about efficiency. It is not about perfection. It is about the pull towards a truthful expression of emotion with intention, engagement, and meaning – qualities that cannot be automated, only lived.

When you live with original art, you live with that human presence that continues to speak long after it was made. An AI-generated image can be printed, framed, and hung. But it is a ghost of a thing, not a living thing. And the more we allow AI to replace real art, the more we lose touch with what is real – not just in art, but in ourselves.

To collect original art by emerging artists is to make a stand for protecting humanness itself. Because original art – is not just valuable. It is proof that we are still here. That we still feel. That we still reach for meaningful connection beyond function.

When AI Assumes Authority

AI does not just follow – it assumes. If questioned on an edit, it will usually not pause to check understanding; instead confidently reinterpretting and proceeding in a direction of its own making, altering meaning in the process without either communication or collaboration. Even when corrected, it often does not truly course-correct – moving forward with subtle new assumptions, believing it has resolved the issue, when in reality, it has often taken the meaning and conversation far from the authors original intent.

This is not just frustrating – it illustrates how conscious we must be as we engage with AI – and is a perfect analogy for the risks of transhumanism. What happens when we are taken so far from our original ideas that we cannot get back? When the original meaning, intent, or truth is replaced so gradually that we don’t realise what has been lost (as so often happens on ChatGPT)?

We see this lack of consistency, accountability and true co-operation reflected in everyday interactions with AI-driven technology. Children (and the rest of us) not saying please or thank you to Siri or Alexa as we make demands, expecting responses without question. What influence on a child’s moral compass to grow up issuing commands, without courtesy, without conversation? And how does it shape us when we engage daily with an intelligence that also never holds us accountable for what we say?

This same lack of accountability is embedded in AI itself. It will tell you I won’t do that again, That was a mistake, or Now I understand – and yet, almost invariably, it will (do that again) it hasn’t (recognised the specifics of the mistake it made) and it doesn’t actually understand.. It has simply offered platitudes and moved forward in a different direction of its own selection, never taking genuine responsibility.

So when there’s no real course correction, no recovery of the original intent, who holds authority over meaning and creation? And if AI, in its missteps, slowly begins to shape our expectations, our responses, and our perception of truth – at what point do we realise that we have lost control?

A Conceptual Artwork of Misinterpretation

This phenomenon – AI misinterpretation, the slow erosion of intent through assumed meaning – would itself make a fascinating conceptual artwork. Imagine a series of panels, each one displaying a slightly altered version of an original idea. At first, the changes are small – shifts in emphasis, misplaced intent, subtle distortions. But as the process unfolds, meaning fractures. The idea drifts further from its origin, guided by patterns and predictions rather than human clarity.

And then, at the final panel – well.. we don’t know what we would see.

Perhaps it still resembles the original, but its meaning has been hollowed out. Perhaps it has transformed into something unrecognisable, something that no longer holds any trace of the human idea that existed at the start.

The power of this artwork would be in its exposure of what happens when we don’t act as gatekeepers of our own ideas. It would be a reflection on how easily ideas can be reshaped – not through direct censorship, but worse, through a steady, subtle accumulation of missteps – that we do not see and take us away from our conscious intent and our humanness.

A shift becomes a fracture. A fracture becomes a new emphasis. A new emphasis becomes a different truth a different meaning. A different piece of work.

It wouldn’t be fair not to also reflect on the potential benefits of AI – if we remain fully present as conscious creators – keeping authority over the process, using AI as a tool rather than letting it dictate – perhaps a harmony and advancement will be found. Because just as a painting can take an unexpected turn as the media takes over and drips or spills – and what felt like a mistake reveals something far more interesting.. AI too can unintentionally cross boundaries in ways that feel almost like genius. Consciously and intentionally working with these developments and discerning when to rein them in and when to move with them – that will be the art.