When AI Replaces Artists

When the modern world came barging in, upending every familiar thing, I thought we would be safe—Surely, I believed, technology could never replace artist. Surely something so stubbornly human as painting, as writing, could not be outsourced. But I was wrong. Artists are becoming relics, fossils in our own lifetimes. Theatres shutter, Broadway falters, novels go unread, newspapers wither to a ghostly thinness. And art does not die slowly, not evolving into some new but vanishing—extinction real time. We mourn not only the loss of our labor but the loss of laboring itself, of the sweat and ache and miracle of making. What happens when there are no more artists? When no one strains to imagine, no one risks the climb, no one dares the blank page or the empty stage? The uncharted world has already arrived, and I stand in it stripped bare—no art left to help me picture the future, no fire to light the way forward, only the silence of our undoing.