“To play a wrong note is insignificant; to play without passion is inexcusable.” — Ludwig Van Beethoven

There have been countless drafts already, innumerable hours of sitting, typing, and retyping manuscripts. Your hands and back ache from the effort, and your mind is foggy from the repetition. But despite the obvious physical pain your job brings about, there is an overwhelming satisfaction you find in reading your own work. As you gaze at the dark words that contrast with the fresh document, their beauty soothes you. This is your page, your chapter, your novel.

Nothing could ever take the place of the sheer effort put into your art. And yet, over the past few years, generative AI has grown at an astounding pace — a form of artificial intelligence trained on vast amounts of data, such as real books and novels, so that it can generate content such as images, videos, and even written text to satisfy a user’s prompt. But these developments, along with all the improvements they promise, bring about messy complications that deepen the controversy already shrouding artificial intelligence. Though it can provide a shortcut to the final product, AI can never make the journey of creation happen for the prompter. Nothing generative AI creates can ever be considered art, because it lacks intent and emotion; it cannot create anything beyond the existing bodies of work it was trained on, and it strives to smooth out every mistake when the beauty and uniqueness of art lie in the imperfections.

Art Without Feeling Is Not Art

Art is a form of inner expression, of channeling emotions, experiences, and ideas. And sometimes, what the artist creates is messy and uncomfortable. But it is real. AI can generate flawless prose with perfect word choice every time. However, whatever it writes is primarily driven by a user’s prompt, not by its own intent. Devoid of intention, of feeling, is it true art?

An article from the University of Oxford titled “Original Creativity, Associative Creativity, and AI” expands on this idea by incorporating the concept of “qualia”. The author, Xiaolan Deng, writes, “Human’s original creativity emerges from the dynamic interactions between the mind and the external world, shaped by emotions, mental states, and personal experiences— what philosophers refer to as ‘qualia’” (Deng para 6). Every person’s qualia are unique because each person experiences life differently. For example, the way someone will experience happiness or the specific fragrance of a rose can never be identical to another’s perception. And these inherent differences are what shape a writer’s voice.

When AI writes about profound sadness, it has never even shed a tear. When it talks about love, it has never felt it.

In many ways, AI simulates experiences because it is incapable of having them, and without these intrinsic human experiences, nothing it writes can ever be art.

Writing is also much more than words. It is a path toward understanding. When a reader picks up a book, they know the words and story mattered to the author. Whether they enjoy the book itself or not is secondary to the quiet respect the reader feels toward the author for writing it. But what if they did not actually write the book? The episode “Would You Read A Novel Written By AI” from the podcast Plot Twist explores this question in more depth. In this episode, the hosts, New York Times bestselling authors Soman Chainani and Victoria Aveyard, discuss how, “…when you’re reading a book, I think there’s an inherent contract with the author that you know they’ve used the writing as some portion of a confessional/healing journey…” (21:46–22:45). To an author, a book is more than a collection of ink and paper; it is almost a component of their subconscious on those pages.

People write to understand themselves better. The act of putting words on a page slowly becomes a journey, with the novel as the final product. Artificial intelligence has no qualia; it goes through no journey as it writes. It does not care about the work it produces, and that in itself prevents the work from ever being called art.

The Accessibility Argument Falls Short

The search to recreate human authenticity has resulted in technologies that feel a bit like a paradox. In August 2025, Grammarly launched a new feature called the “Humanizer” agent, meant to reword AI-written texts to be less rigid and robotic-sounding. By simulating human errors, such as unpredictable punctuation or unlikely word choices, it attempts to make writing more human.

A common argument is that artificial intelligence makes art more accessible to a wider population. By using tools like Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini, non-artists can generate paintings, write novels, and even compose full-scale orchestral pieces. In the article “In Defense of AI Art: History Repeats Itself, Again, Again, and Again”, the author, Craig Boehman points out, “it doesn’t matter if you’re a photographer, painter, director, musician, or engraver. You can use AI to create the basic piece by using prompts or samples of original works” (para 3). AI helps people who are not artists create art.

However, this brings the question back to the definition of art. Art is expression; there is no such thing as a non-artist. Every person has their way of expressing themselves in the world, and something so deeply personal can never be held back by boundaries such as the inability to write well, as “well” is highly subjective. Art is not synonymous with perfection; there is yet to come a piece of work that is absolutely flawless.

This is the reason Grammarly’s Humanizer exists; why countless other tools similar to it are being developed rapidly, in efforts to mimic that innate uniqueness and creativity. Many people get stuck in a loop, asking generative AI to first generate a piece of writing, then “humanizing” it using a humanizer, so that an AI checker does not flag the work.

But art is not clicking buttons and typing prompts; it is emotion and intent. Even if the outcome is not perfect and immaculate every single time.

An Imitation of Everything, an Expression of Nothing

You are maneuvering your full cart at the grocery store when you stop suddenly. That song playing on the store’s speakers. That song. You close your eyes, skepticism setting in as you listen closer. The melody is the same, classic and easily recognizable — but that beat. It has been remixed. Multiple times. You shake your head, pushing the cart forward and expertly around other carts, but cannot shake the feeling of eating something past stale.

This is the same fatigue that is now starting to surface as markets get flooded with AI-written novels. People love stories because they have evolved to be an essential part of who we are. We are always searching for something new on the page, hoping to catch a fresh metaphor or an unlikely word choice that leaves us admiring the author. Eventually, even the most tolerant reader becomes exhausted by cliché-ridden stories, tired phrasing, and the same rigid tropes that recur across countless novels.

If a human author treats clichés and tropes as mere boundaries to transcend, then generative AI treats them as absolute ceilings, the final and correct conclusion to whatever it writes.

This is why almost all AI writing sounds exactly alike. Author Dr. Sybil Prince Nelson, in her article “Regurgitative AI: Why ChatGPT Won’t Kill Original Thought” explains how, “While ChatGPT may be able to write a poem about aardvarks in the style of Robert Frost or a ballad about Evariste Galois in the style of Carole King, it can’t write my next novel, because it doesn’t yet exist” (Nelson para 11).

Imagine someone who has read every single book in the world and never cried after a sad ending, smiled after a happy one; someone who knows all the words, but never actually feels them. That is generative AI. It cannot come up with new ideas on its own because, when it “brainstorms,” it draws on the massive amounts of data it was trained on. Without the spark of an idea, of self-driven original thought, anything that AI creates remains an empty imitation of millions of works that came before it.

When was the last time you refused to turn the last page of a novel because doing that meant the book would be over? When was the last time you stayed inside those pages long after the novel ended, rereading each quote, each carefully chosen word? The authors of the books that we love and carry with us every day actually picked up the pen. They typed the manuscript, endured countless hours of revision and rewording.

And when you do the same, when you hold the pen, not the machine? Then the immense satisfaction felt while reading over your own words can never be replicated. They may not always be perfect and masterfully chosen, but they are yours. They meant something to you; they are art. Generative AI may create the destination, but it will never be able to reproduce the journey to get there. To an artist, the journey of creation is often more necessary than the final product. Without qualia, deeply personal experiences to drive it, without creativity and the desire to express itself, without the spontaneity that often makes the best works memorable, can anything that generative AI possibly creates be considered art?

Works Cited

Boehman, Craig. “In Defense of AI Art: History Repeats Itself, Again, Again, and Again.” Craig Boehman, 13 June 2023.

Deng, Xiaolan. “Original Creativity, Associative Creativity, and AI.” Oxford AI Ethics, 2024.

Plot Twist Podcast. “Would You Read a Novel Written by AI?” YouTube, 26 June 2025.

Prince, Sybil. “Regurgitative AI: Why ChatGPT Won’t Kill Original Thought.” Faculty Focus, 29 Oct. 2025.