While I don’t doubt for a second that images like the one at the top of this page could be easily generated with AI, that they wouldn’t have been made by me predicts at least a million meaningful differences.
This is what I explained to my daughter as we were making art together over the weekend.
Yes, we could be making images much faster, but we’d be missing out on the experience that working more slowly, touching things, and discovering interesting connections among seemingly worthless scraps of paper provides.
There’s a place for both, of course—ponderous, handcraft and pragmatic production alike—but an image that is simply generated offers the viewer everything and the maker nothing.
The distinction between what the viewer gets and what the maker gets explains something essential about why craft persists even as generation becomes effortless. I feel lucky to have learned it early.
When I was very young, after my parents divorced, my sister and I would spend weekday afternoons at our grandparents’ house while our mother worked. We’d sit with my grandfather in his den while he watched the evening news. I developed a strange habit: I would fold a piece of paper into thirds like a brochure and write vertical columns of numbers along each side, starting with 1 and working my way down as far as I could go.
It’s obvious to me now, forty years later, that this was a way to bring order to a life that felt suddenly chaotic. It must have been obvious to my grandparents too, because they never mentioned it. They just kept the paper stocked.
I remember laboring over those pages. I would slowly inscribe the numbers, trying to keep them perfectly aligned and the columns perfectly straight. I wanted my hand to produce something that only a machine could.
Later, in elementary school, we began learning the BASIC programming language. One of the first things I tried was this simple command:
FOR I = 1 TO 100
PRINT I
NEXT
On my hand-written pages, it would have taken me the better part of the entire news broadcast to reach 100. When I hit ENTER, I felt a sudden thrill as a vertical column of numbers flowed in a blur from the top to the bottom of my screen. I felt its motion downward—the illusion of that building list pulling me into the seat of my chair. In seconds, it was done.
I re-typed the command, increasing 100 to 1000 and again hit ENTER. It only took a few seconds more. But there was no excitement this time. The exercise already seemed pointless. It was just a list of numbers now; there was nothing of me in it.
What was it in hours of hand-cramped writing that seconds in front of a computer couldn’t provide? It wasn’t about completing something. I have no memory of keeping those pages, after all. It was the act—the writing itself—that gave me the peace, or clarity, or tiny bit of control that I needed.
The computer gave me the output I thought I wanted. But it couldn’t give me what I was actually getting from the process.
This is what gets lost when we optimize only for outputs. When we measure value only by what gets produced, not by what gets learned or felt or understood through the act of making.
Making art by hand teaches my daughter—and me—things that cannot be learned by prompting:
Material constraints. What do we have to work with? How do these pieces fit together? What can we make from what we have?
Physical manipulation. How does this paper feel? How does it tear? How does glue behave? How do colors interact when they’re actually touching? How does the physicality of a material affect what we later see?
Aesthetic judgment. Does this feel right here? What happens if I move it? What does this composition need?
The satisfaction of making something exist that didn’t before. Of putting yourself into it. Of leaving traces of your decisions in the final object.
These fundamentals of art making are also necessary to developing the kind of systems thinking in people who can build genuinely novel things. It’s an education that I don’t think can be shortcut, even with the most powerful technology. It has to be earned by eye and hand.
AI is capable of mimicking the output of any artist, of that I am sure. But it cannot give an artist what she gets by making herself. And this—this irreducible value in the act of making—is why craft will persist.
The builders who remain in our AI future will those who understand this. They will know the value of labor, time, constraints, and intuition because they will have experienced them and integrated the knowledge that only they can convey.
Too easy, too fast, too permissive, too systematic—it all means too little of you in it. And when there’s too little of you in a thing, you can’t learn from it. You can only consume it.
The computer gave me my column of numbers to 1,000. But my grandfather’s den, the folded paper, the careful alignment of hand-written digits—that gave me something else entirely.
My daughter will forget the specific collages we made. But she won’t forget what it feels like to make something with her hands, to work within constraints, to put herself into an object and see it become real. That’s what making gives the maker. And no amount of effortless generation can replace it.