Creating in the Synthetic Fog

This article is part of the Synthetic Worlds series. This time, we explore the cultural and artistic territories reshaped by automation — in their economies, practices, and very symbols.

Generative AI is now infiltrating every creative domain: text, image, music, video, animation, storytelling. Where the production of ideas, projects, and artworks once demanded years of experience and craft, these systems now generate formatted, publishable, seemingly coherent content — in seconds.

This normalization of creative output raises a fundamental question: can one still live from ideas in a world where machines produce them at scale? Can one still defend a singular artistic, cultural, or intellectual path when the tools themselves replace the act of creation?

The industrialization of culture #

A growing number of recent studies warn of AI’s powerful standardizing effects across all forms of media production. MIT, for instance, demonstrated that intensive use of text assistants like ChatGPT leads to a phenomenon of metacognitive laziness (1): users, relying on the tool, lose critical thinking and align with generic structures.

The New Yorker observed a similar trend in journalism, literature, and design (2): the more AI spreads, the more language, imagery, and formats become uniform.

AI does not create; it aggregates, interpolates, and optimizes from pre-existing data while exploiting the gray — and increasingly weakened — zone of copyright law. Legal frameworks attempt to respond to this wave of remix culture but currently fail to protect creators without costly and rapidly outdated reverse-engineering.

Brand as vessel #

Beneath this legal struggle lies a deeper issue: the gradual disappearance of individual voice in favor of constant, standardized, often unanchored flows. Creativity has become a commodity, where speed and volume outweigh meaning — and only the construction of a Brand in the noble sense — a coherent system of emotions, narratives, and identity — seems capable of offering creators a stable and viable space.

Only the construction of a Brand — a coherent system of emotions, narratives, and identity — seems capable of offering creators a stable and viable space.

The rise of personal branding is, in my view, an unprecedented signal. The near-universal retreat from professional identity into self-marketing — positioning the individual on equal footing with corporations, with a duty to communicate, narrate, and sell (skills, emotion, beauty) and to prove worth through success — shows just how much pressure weighs on human presence in synthetic space.

Brand — whether personal, collective, commercial, or artistic — becomes a strategic response to automated cultural environments. It anchors work and voice in a readable, claimed framework, protected by a slow narrative cultivated over time, where origin and intent matter more than content efficiency.

Inspired by the reflections of Kris Krüg (3), one might see here a space for political reconstruction: where traditional intellectual property falters, brand may serve as a tool for reclaiming — not through file ownership or stylistic exclusivity, but through legitimacy built over time, through commitment, and through what I believe matters most: community.

Viewed through the lens of the commons, identity becomes more than a wrapper — it becomes a concentration of shared and collective experiences, a narrative foundation, perhaps also a reference point for something "real" and human. It offers grounding in a context where reality is constantly in doubt, where everything can be remixed, revised, commodified. It becomes a vessel of intention and emotion. And it is perhaps this symbolic density, forged over time, that allows it to resist algorithmic standardization.

A new tension emerges #

Yet another, perhaps heavier, question arises: what becomes of an industry that can keep growing while dispensing with the humans who built it?

We’ve speculated plenty about the replacement of manual labor. Less about the progressive disappearance of intellectual work.

Writing, illustrating, designing — these were, until recently, considered safe paths to employment, or even to social mobility. But if drawing, designing, illustrating, or screenwriting becomes a free gesture, what remains for creatives and artists? Perhaps the old conflict between capital and culture has found new fuel, completing the exploitation of those who once supplied the world with beauty, meaning, emotion, and thought.

The promises of the creative economy — to live from one’s voice, style, or perspective — now clash with a starker reality. LLMs don’t merely assist — they replace. Not always well, but fast enough to meet demand, without fatigue, wages, or resistance — just like AI personas, which further blur our perception of what’s real online.

No one knows how this deep shift — akin to a new industrial revolution on par with the advent of the internet — will unfold, but signs suggest its social, ecological, and economic consequences will be significant. Entire professions may collapse, much like the equine sector did a century ago with the arrival of automobiles. In under ten years, the horse industry vanished, putting nearly 10% of the U.S. workforce out of work.

The illusion of multiplied productivity will mask the silent precarity of an entire layer of intellectual and artistic labor.

As with media in the early 2000s, much of the economic value may shift elsewhere: to platforms, to distribution tools, to areas where speed, volume, and context matter more than raw quality.

But this redirection won’t make up for the social fracture. And in the margins of this new paradigm, in this interregnum, monsters appear, as Antonio Gramsci wrote. In an era of generalized confusion, eroded freedoms, endlessly rewritten content and viral synthetic imagery, ideological appropriation grows.

The far right, long skilled in manipulating national narratives, finds fertile ground for spreading falsified histories. Historical revisionism and propaganda are no longer stylistic figures — they are near-native functions of the technologies we now deploy (4). Anger, hate, and fear are potent and dangerously accessible emotions.

A return to cultural craft #

In this context, a renewed form of artistic craft might offer a powerful counterpoint — not out of nostalgia, but as resistance to a system displacing the human from their role as creator of their own culture. A slow, collective, imperfect process becomes part of the cultural commons, opposing the infinite speed of AI microchips.

But nothing is guaranteed. Creating today no longer means just making an object or cultural medium — it means holding space for a coherent, human, and recognizable voice in an oversaturated environment. A voice that says: I am still here.