Yes, AI art does not have a soul. But did art before it have one?

This is why the comments under a Sylvia Plath quote on social media often read, “She is so me,” even if the person writing it may not have the appetite for the darkness Plath lived with or written a poem, ever. But faint resemblance is enough. The illusion of seeing yourself in an artwork is comforting. This is why Marcel Proust once said, “One can never read a novel without giving its heroine the form and features of the woman one loves”.

So when AI began offering Studio Ghibli-style image generation, it caused havoc on the internet. People reacted with the frenzy of toddlers on Red Bull. They uploaded their memories, personal photos, old dates, even dead pets — everything rendered in Ghibli’s style. All this accompanied by the caption: “I made this today”. A statement so devoid of truth it could pass for a politician’s tweet.

But the question of originality is not new. It has haunted art for over a century. In 1917, Marcel Duchamp walked into an exhibition carrying a urinal. He placed it on a pedestal, signed it “R. Mutt,” and called it Fountain. Duchamp wasn’t interested in skill or beauty. He believed art wasn’t something you made, but something you chose. He called it a “readymade”: Mass-produced objects that became art the moment an artist pointed at them and said, “this.” His philosophy was — selection, not invention. The point wasn’t the object. The point was the question it forced: What exactly makes something art? And who gets to decide?

At the time, critics were horrified. They called it obscene, juvenile, absurd. A century later, it hangs in museums, without irony, as one of the most influential works of the 20th century. Duchamp’s strange art created a lineage. It gave us conceptual art, then pop art, and eventually, the present-day internet confusion where nobody knows if anything means anything.

What Duchamp suggested, Andy Warhol mass-produced. If Duchamp suggested, “Art is an idea,” Warhol screamed, “Originality is a scam”. He didn’t want to invent — he wanted to repeat. Soup cans. Marilyn Monroe. Bottle caps. Boredom. Warhol’s studio was called The Factory. “I want to be a machine,” he once said. It sounded avant-garde then. Today, it sounds like the job description of an Insta meme page admin.

In 2025, with AI, art became stranger and more disorienting. You can now type: “Draw my picture like sad Marilyn Monroe in the style of Van Gogh,” and the machine delivers. No artist. No studio. No brushes. No pain of an artist. No exploitation of overworked and underpaid interns.

In that sense, AI art is less creation and more a philosophical prank. It isn’t made, it’s selected. Not crafted, just curated. It is not the birth of beauty, but the smooth functioning of a cultural supply chain inside a Disneyland of desire in a consumerist society.

There are growing and valid debates about whether AI-generated art is appropriating the work of known artists, and why someone like Sam Altman isn’t asking Hayao Miyazaki for permission or sharing any of the profits.

It’s a fair question, but the outrage might be too narrow. Especially when viewed through the long lens of art history, where appropriation isn’t a deviation — it’s the method. Especially in India, privileged artists have long borrowed, remixed, and repackaged the aesthetics of marginalised communities, selling these copies in galleries. From Gond, Warli, and Bhil traditions to countless regional crafts, folk and tribal art forms have been renamed “ethnic” or “contemporary tribal art” or “rustic, minimalistic art from the countryside” and sold without credit or compensation to their original creators. These styles rooted in oral traditions, ritual, and everyday life are flattened into decor, stripped of meaning.

Bollywood, too, has borrowed freely: Folk songs are lifted, visual cultures mined, and aesthetics from marginalised communities are used on screen while their makers remain invisible.

Now, AI makes this cycle even more efficient, generating Madhubani or Pattachitra-style images in seconds, ethics be damned. The lineage of artistic theft continues — now with a better user interface. And once again, it’s the local artists — many of whom aren’t even granted the dignity of being called artists — who will suffer the most, just in newer, more polished ways.

Many also say that AI lacks a soul. It does — but did mass culture ever have one? Instagram filters, recycled music, identical dance trends — everything’s been a remix for years. AI just made the sameness more efficient and added another layer to it. It generates 500 pretty images that mean nothing. One may ask: Will we finally start valuing uniqueness when everything begins to look the same? But the truth is, originality was never rewarded to begin with. Vincent Van Gogh, now a pop symbol of tortured brilliance, spent his life in obscurity, doubting whether any of it made sense. The examples are endless. The world has rarely been kind to those who spend their lives honing something truly their own.

The real question is this: Is an art-averse, proudly consumerist society finally ready to take non-AI art — and the artists who pour their lives into it — seriously?

It remains to be seen how long AI art will keep the excitement alive. Not because it’s artificial, but because it flattens too much. It smooths out the rough edges — the friction — that makes art stay with you. More importantly, it is wired into the logic of social media trends. And the thing about trends is — they are disposable. Short-lived dopamine balloons, floating through the attention spans of the distracted, all chasing the next hit of validation.

Once the algorithm stops rewarding it, the party ends. And when that happens, will society turn back to artists whose work bleeds context and stubborn originality?

Only God can tell us. Or perhaps Grok can.

The writer is an author, podcaster and multimedia artist