Destruction, Rebirth, and Transformation

While much of the attention on AI has been focused on its impact on productivity and the bottom line, the conversation has largely ignored AI’s potential to facilitate art. In fact, the discussion around art and AI has been mostly about how AI will detract from and disenfranchise artists.

And it’s true. There’s no avoiding that reality. Fashion labels have turned to digital twins, production studios are scaling down their special effects teams in favor of AI-generated CGI, and independent illustrators and graphic designers everywhere are finding that demand for their work is dwindling. AI has already replaced the art-as-asset category — headshots, photo touch-ups, and video editing. And even when there is a compensation model, it often doesn’t include the larger community of creators whose work was swallowed up.

Beyond the economic displacement, there’s a deeper concern: the soullessness of AI-created art. A fine line exists between AI used as a tool for execution and AI used as a stand-in for the artist. It’s the distinction between wielding the tool and letting the tool wield itself. When working with AI, it’s incredibly easy to let it lead. Designed to be an obsequious yes-man, AI is all too ready to jump on a prompt and give you the world, interpreted an infinite number of ways limited only by your token count.

But once you allow it to make decisions, formulate strategies, or expand upon an idea, is the work still yours? Does it still contain the derivatives of a lived experience that makes it meaningful, or is it now regurgitated data molded to its client?

AI-created art is empty.

But reality is, as ever, not binary. In thinking about the role of AI in our world, I am reminded of the mythology of Shiva, one of Hinduism’s Holy Trinity, the destroyer and transformer of the world. AI is a force that will collapse certain parts of reality as we know it — and in its place will spring up something new.

AI is as much of a creator as it is a destroyer.

This past weekend, I encountered an entire showcase of people who harnessed AI’s force for creation.

I was at Verci, a co-working space and social club in the Flatiron district of NYC. They host a regular event series called New Interfaces, an afternoon of demos presented by engineers, designers, artists, and every intersection between them. This was my reintroduction into the tech scene in NYC again after a long time of being away, and while I knew AI was bound to be at the center of the discussion, I wasn’t expecting it to be the single driver behind almost every demo. And these demos were not just elevator pitches from founders — these were developers and artists who were making for the sake of making. Not just interfaces to generate a conversion or turn a profit, but art projects. These creators don’t have an art background, and are not those who would traditionally identify as artists.

In fact, most of the people who presented were software engineers. Some of these projects were truly museum worthy, such as Joshua Wolk’s musical MTA map that used the MTA’s open source data to turn the chaos of delays into perennially-evolving experimental jazz. Or take a look at adhiv dhar’s novelty Mac OSX nostalgia UI, which features an embedded Terminal interface that taps into the Claude API and makes Claude accessible via command-line in an operating-system-within-operating-system metacomputing joke that sparked a chuckle across the room. It is the kind of whimsical project that is borne simply from imagination.

While both of these creators could have made their projects using their own coding skills, AI dramatically reduced the time required, making these whimsical projects feasible. In the same way that Claude empowers non-coders with a vision to be proficient coders, and it empowers coders to be even more fluent at creating — you’ll still need a vision and imagination as an input, but the barrier of execution is suddenly much lighter.

It’s like getting a superpower — a superpower that I was dearly in need of.

The reality of UX is that it’s a discipline that’s often more closely aligned with strategy than design. You become a kind of problem-solving generalist, which is great when you need to operate as a Swiss-army-knife of sorts for whatever project we end up on. We exist in the ambiguity between — we see the real shape of the problem, investigate its nuances, and architect the scaffolding and structure that holds everything up.

But being the intermediary has its drawbacks. As is often said: good design is invisible. For an experience designer, even when our fingerprints are all over the work, they’re not what people see once the product’s been shipped. People will see the brand design, the logo mark, the typography. They’ll see the animations and they’ll read the content. But experience is embedded. We’re always in partnership. We don’t deliver alone. Shipping a vision of my own from end-to-end has always been a challenge.

For UX designers and artists alike, there’s forever the dream of delivering on your vision. And as a multi-hyphenate creative who designs digital experiences, writes poetry and prose, and makes art, I’ve always had so much to do, and so little time to excel at every skillset I need. I’ve recently realized that the type of art I make is a perfect fit for augmentation by AI. My artwork is code-based, interactive, and animated — but I’ve always been held back by the limitations of my coding skills. I’ve spent hours on CodePen working out SVG animations, but there’s only so much you can get done when you’re a creative generalist aspiring to make something that requires a technologist’s skillset. Using AI as a production delivery partner allows me to experiment with design and code in a way that would have been cost- or time-prohibitive previously.

In my first article on AI for creative applications, I used Claude to build a custom-designed portfolio in a matter of weeks. It was my first real experience using Claude Code, and I documented the creative process that gave me the first-hand experience and evidence that informed this article. In it, I engaged with Claude Code three different ways on a creative project: with it as the sole executor, as a collaborator, and as an extension. In each case except for the last, the results were generic and disappointing — a clear demonstration that AI without strong creative direction produces empty work. Only when I designed the base mockup myself and used Claude to extend the system in the third approach was the output creatively satisfactory.

Any creative professional would agree that the process of building a portfolio is akin to pulling teeth. But as I was prompting Claude to create my vision in a sort of mind-meld hypnotic state only interrupted by hitting a token limit, I discovered that I was, of all things… having fun.

The experience reminded me of how I felt when I was experimenting with design early in life. Back then, there weren’t any social media platforms beyond AOL Instant Messenger, so people created their own spaces on the internet. It was the Wild West, certainly. It was creating for the sake of creation. Making simply for the joy of it.

I spent many months over several summers of my high school years designing and shipping websites in my room for no other purpose than to just make stuff. In the process, I taught myself how to code. It wasn’t anything very advanced — just HTML and CSS. But to this day I remember fondly the spirit of pure exploration. It’s the reason, years later, I would switch from an early career as a Product Manager to focus more purely on design.

Sitting at the other end of my laptop’s terminal screen twenty years later, I’m burning through my tokens and for the first time in a long time, I feel the possibilities stretching ahead of me. I’m an artist again.

AI won’t be an equalizer for everyone. The creative professionals losing work to algorithmic replacements aren’t experiencing democratization — they’re experiencing displacement. And even though “AI slop” lacks the context that makes it truly meaningful, many people who are exposed to it simply won’t notice or care.

But for those of us who possess a creative vision, AI offers something we’ve never had before: the ability to overcome barriers and make what we imagine. This doesn’t erase the harm, but it does complicate the narrative. The same technology that’s collapsing certain creative economies is also enabling new forms of creation. The challenge — for all of us — is to acknowledge both realities at once. To mourn what’s being lost while remaining open to what’s becoming possible. To remember that every transformation carries both destruction and rebirth.

The question isn’t whether AI will change art. It already has. The question is whether we’re willing to pick up this new tool and see what we can build with it.