Hugin & Munin Journal

For centuries, art looked like the last refuge from automation. Machines could calculate, classify, optimise, and reproduce. Creativity seemed different: an activity rooted in experience, intention, and the peculiar human need to make one thing stand for another. Generative AI has made that distinction harder to maintain. It can now produce stories, music, images, voices, animation, and video. Much of the material remains uneven, but awkward outputs are no longer the decisive fact. What matters is that plausible cultural material can be produced faster, at greater scale, and at a fraction of its former cost. The resulting question reaches beyond whether an individual image is beautiful or derivative. If machines can generate culture in enormous quantities, what happens to the human ecosystem from which that culture was learned? Machines can imitate the surface of culture. The harder question is what happens beneath it. Editorial image generated by the author. The...