What Happens When No One Paints Anymore?
There are few things more human than the act of creation. The sound of a pencil scratching across paper. The weight of a brush in the hand, and the smell of oil paint as it dries on canvas. The stillness in a room before a musician draws their bow across strings and the audience hold their breath together. These are the quiet connections that bind us.
Generative AI is moving fast into every corner of our creative lives. It is already writing music for corporate videos, producing images for brochures, and filling in the tasks that once kept artists afloat. At first glance this looks efficient, but underneath it risks pulling away one of the most important supports of human creativity.
Most artists do not spend all their time creating masterpieces. They earn their living through everyday work. A song for a television advert. A sketch for a pamphlet. A simple layout for a website. These pieces may not hang in galleries or win awards, but they are vital. They provide income, they provide practice, and they provide the stepping stones on the path to mastery.
Practice is not glamorous, but it is everything. A violinist becomes great not through a single performance, but through years of repeating scales until their fingers move without thought. A painter becomes great not through one inspired canvas, but through hundreds of hours of mixing colours, stretching canvas, and layering paint. Every small task, every commission, every job, builds the muscle memory of creativity.
If those everyday tasks disappear, the path towards mastery begins to crumble. Fewer artists will be able to survive financially. Fewer will spend the hours repeating the work that hones their skills. Fewer still will become the teachers and mentors who pass those skills on.
This is not a one-time loss, it is a cycle. Imagine one generation where eighty per cent of entry level creative work is taken by machines. The next generation grows up with far fewer living examples, far fewer opportunities, and far fewer mentors. Skills decline. In the generation after that, the decline is sharper still. Over time entire art forms begin to hollow out, not in a sudden collapse, but in a quiet thinning that repeats until almost nothing remains.
The irony is sharp. Generative AI itself depends on the archive of human creativity. It learns from paintings and music and writing produced by generations of people before us. If human practice dries up, AI will continue to generate, but only by recycling a frozen past. It will be remixing echoes of a golden age, without any new voices to refresh it.
When skills die, we lose more than work. We lose touch, sound, and presence. The texture of brush hairs against canvas. The silence shared between musicians and listeners. The imperfections that make every performance unique. These are not outputs, they are living experiences, and without people to carry them forward they risk becoming curiosities of history, like forgotten languages studied but never spoken.
As technologists and builders we have a choice. We can design tools that replace human skill, or we can design tools that deepen it. We can build systems that isolate us, or systems that strengthen our connection to one another. My own belief is that technology should never stand in the way of human practice. It should give us new ways to learn, new ways to share, and new ways to grow.
The question is what kind of creative world we want to leave to the next generation. Do we want them to inherit a culture where painting and music are living traditions, sustained through practice and passed hand to hand, or do we want them to grow up in a world where such skills exist only in archives, kept alive by machines trained on memories?
The loss may not be visible tomorrow or even the day after. It may take decades for the hollowing out to show itself. But if each generation loses most of its talent pool, the result is inevitable. A slow thinning until art itself becomes endangered.
Every choice we make today shapes that future. Each time we support a living artist, commission a musician, or choose a piece of human work over a machine-made shortcut, we keep the chain unbroken.
The danger of generative AI is not only that it changes how we create today. It is that it may leave our grandchildren with nothing but echoes of our past. If we allow that cycle to repeat, then in the end the only beings still able to create will be the machines, drawing forever from a lost age of human touch.
