When we have no touchmarks in common, we have no culture.
Art used to carry the weight of experience. Painters painted from life. Poets bled into their work. Songs came from struggle, joy, faith. Now, AI generates art without memory, music without longing, prose without authorship.
It is cheap, limitless, and eerily pleasing. But it is rootless. It borrows form without source, style without substance. It feeds on existing culture but adds nothing new—just infinite permutations of what already was.
Human artists can’t compete. Why pay a composer when you can generate a symphony? Why fund a novelist when AI can mimic Hemingway?
So the real artists quit. Or adapt. Or fade.
Over time, the cultural ecosystem withers. What remains is a glossy slurry of generative content: optimized for engagement, devoid of soul.
The loss isn’t aesthetic. It’s civilizational. Without human-made culture, we lose the mirror that lets us see ourselves.
A society without authentic culture becomes a society without memory. And, hence, ceases to be a society.
