IT SAVES TIME.
Lenore O. Turajlič

It is a misconception to think man's instinct to create is a feature of our most recent evolution - a fallacy no less, to disregard the relics of the old world, since we rely so heavily on that of the new. The fabric of our humanity is interwoven with art. In our very essence, our humanity and creating are synonymous. We have never existed without art and it has never existed without us. In all versions of humanity that have come to pass, spanning as far back as our earliest conception, the instinct to create has always existed. It is unchangeable.

The rawest demonstration of humanity can be found in the Paleolithic era. Located in the Santa Cruz province of Argentina, Cueva de las Manos "Cave of the Hands" is by all means nothing of technical extravagance. In an era of ingenuity that is constantly adapting and surpassing itself, even by standards of the last century alone, Cueva de las Manos is unsophisticated. The cave walls, aged by the hands of time and nature, continue to stand still even after centuries. The jagged rough rock faces are adorned with vibrant splotches of black, white and red, each centering a hand with five fingers. Though diverse in size and shape, they are each undisputedly human. Some have long narrow fingers that overlap another's small palm. Some have girthy wide fingers that overlap long, vast palms. Some are fainter than others, but all belong to a person, the memory of whom has eroded with time.

Anthropologists harken to Cueva de las Manos in demonstrating the ingenuity that has always accompanied humans, even at our most primal. The use of pigments made up of finely ground clay, minerals and charcoal bound with water, urine, animal blood, egg yolk or plant juice were applied to the walls with split sticks, hands or by blowing the pigmentations onto the walls with a hollowed pipe. It is a testament to the adaptability and resourcefulness of our species, whilst also being one of the first examples proving indisputably just how ingrained our capacity for complexity and how innate our ability to find and create symbolism are within us.

However, in my eyes Cueva de las Manos signifies something unquantifiable and distinctly tender. Just as these ancestors who continue nameless throughout time, I see in myself what is left of them. A deep instinct to create, to be seen, so that I too am not lost to time.

It is this urge to create and express that I fear has become streamlined in this endless pursuit of immediacy and convenience, even at our own loss. And in no other respect have I seen a stronger example of this deterioration of our humanity than in generative AI, and its killing of the artist. In severing man of his artistic labour by outsourcing AI to create and express for him, we have divorced man of his essence - the primal urge and desire to express and create proof that he exists and will not be lost to time. In its stead, AI leaves a mere effigy of humanity — a mere erosion of this instinct.

The parameters around art and what makes art 'art' have been argued ad nauseam. Notoriously, Duchamp has been one of the most polemical voices in this discussion. Succeeding the industrial revolution, the discussion of semantics shifted alongside the introduction of mass-produced commodities. The question was no longer just "what is art?" but "how is art to be defined within the era of commodity"?

The aforementioned Duchamp, a French-American Artist prominent in New York's Avant-Garde scene, further antagonized this ongoing argument of artistic semantics, by submitting what would go on to be the most infamous piece of his career —— "The Fountain".

Much of Duchamp's career was punctuated by his insistence on 'de-deifying' the artist, through a Copernican approach. Seemingly this cumulated in "The Fountain"——a standard Bedfordshire model urinal flipped upside down, with 'R.Mutt', Duchamp's pseudonym, written around the mouth's bowl. Initially submitted under said pseudonym to the Inaugural Exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists, of whom Duchamp was a board member at the time, it was rejected prior to the exhibition's opening despite the board's claim to "accept all submissions". It later debut at the exhibition, however its viewing was suppressed as it was never placed in the gallery's showing area, prompting Duchamp to resign from the board indignantly.

A satire, possibly. A critique, most definitely. Duchamp insisted his intention behind the urinal was to move art away from its current paradigm — a display of technical, physical craft — toward a demonstration of intellectual interpretation.

The criticisms lobbied against "The Fountain" have not changed within the passing of the last century. They are, and have always been, in regard to the commodity and if not, then toward Duchamp's lack of effort put forth in the creation of it.

The parallels between generative AI and Duchamp's "The Fountain" are apparent. But this is deceptive. Both are polarizing symbols for paradigm shifts in the art world which, in their adolescence, were met with hostility if not entirely disqualified and suppressed by the art world due to their challenge of pedagogy. It is an argument I am surprised not to have encountered from AI defenders in this discussion, though I suppose Chatgpt has not yet made the connection.

It is in this comparison of Duchamp [and subsequently Ready-mades but "The Fountain" for brevity] and generative AI where we find the defining difference. Duchamp did not make the urinal used in "The Fountain". Similar to AI "art", it was not the accumulation of his skill, nor time, nor labour; but, rather it was the accumulation of his taste over his lifetime of experiences and his act of choosing the urinal that distinguishes the urinal as art. This act of choice differentiates Duchamp's "The Fountain"'s from the duplicitous equivalence to AI "art". Art is the accumulation of one's taste from life experiences that lends itself to their artistic vision and thereby the execution of it.

"Whether Mr Mutt with his own hands made the fountain or not has no importance. He CHOSE it. He took an ordinary article of life, placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view—created a new thought for that object." (Louise Norton, Buddha of the Bathroom)

The vision of "The Fountain" is present and carried to completion through Duchamp's choice; the choice to use this specific object to communicate his intention. Generative AI and subsequently the "art" it generates contrastly has no artistic vision; nor an accumulation of taste accrued over a lifetime of experiences to communicate this vision. It is not the accumulation of the artist's taste so much as it is a database plagiarizing other's work to neither create nor communicate the "artist's" intention, but rather to decide for the "artist". AI robs you of choice. Duchamp choosing the urinal demonstrates thought, taste and artistic vision. AI compensates, or rather overrides, this entirely through the plagiarism of others' work. AI chooses, the artist does not. Just as it robs you of your choice, it robs you of experiencing creation. It saves you the time.

In his article, ‘AI Killed The Creative Arts’, Chris Yoko writes: “The great thing about technology, like AI, is that as it makes art easier to create, we get more art and more artists. Neither the act of creating, or consuming art is diminished by these advances, in fact, the opportunities to do both of these things increase.” (Yoko Chris, 2024). Though not explicitly stated outright, I feel the Trojan Horse of accessibility merely obfuscates the deeper desire: in the age of immediate gratification, why can’t I have art now?

Sociologically speaking, this demand of art to be something that is immediate is unsurprising. I'd argue that this demand of art to be both immediate and convenient is a natural progression of capitalism. In having divorced the aforementioned artisan from his labour so long ago, Marx postured that we've come into an age of commodity fetishism; and to that I would add, now punctuated by AI. "Commodity fetishism", as Marx coined in his work "Das Kapital" is the mass severance of labour from product, or rather the obfuscation of mass labour from product. Consumers, then, are under the impression that commodities merely appear and these static objects hold an inherent value; however, it is only the human relations within the process of creating these commodity that give them their value. With mass production, these social relations at each step of manufacturing are lost and disguised in the mysticism of the commodity. And, in this veil of mist, human relations and human working conditions are stripped from the product, more often than not, to hide the nature of this labour.

Just as capitalism obfuscated the labour of its commodities, generated "art" just appears, divorced from its construction. It is specifically this divorce of its existence from that of which it took from that makes generative AI, and subsequently the "art" it generates, not art; as the machine does not produce from taste. The method by which it steals is not taste. Taste arises from inspiration which is something that fundamentally is aware of its references and able to trace back to them. Mass production mimics the fortitude of man’s labour, just as AI mimics the fortitude of man’s choice.

These objects, these commodities, are not the process nor the time nor the vision nor the taste nor the execution of its artisan; it merely exists. It just is. And it is this —— this over reliance on convenience and immediate gratification that AI defenders also demand of art. Do not have meaning, nor time nor taste nor vision. Just exist. Just be. Now.

Other advocates of AI have taken to a feudalist approach when defending AI's place within art. Common points that continue to circle this discussion are the following: these advancements in technology serve to aid us in our creative pursuits; AI is here and we ought to adapt or be left behind; perhaps time is circular and this is yet another example of new technology being demonized by the traditionalists of the art world before we relent and recognize just how much it has to offer us. On the latter point, I often see them gesture to the invention of the camera as begetting the art form of photography or the drawing tablet to digital art. Prima facie, the argument for generative AI could be made using the latter examples; namely generative AI's total automatization of art mirrors the past technological strides in automatizing photography and drawing. Does it not?

No.

Art is the accumulation of one's taste culminating in one's artistic vision and thereby one's execution of it. No matter how autonomous the camera or the drawing tablet has become, it is an interchangeable tool that aids the body in carrying out the mind's vision. And I would add that we as a species have always used tools, even at our most primal. That's not the issue being discussed nor the reason for the outrage toward AI. The problem arises because, with AI, those tools streamline the time needed to acquire taste and thereby vision, by digesting anything and regurgitating everything. Put simply, how can "art" produced by a tool, not a human being, be art? Neither the technology used for digital art nor photography remedy a lack of taste, rather they are tools that are wielded with taste and vision, not in substitution of it. The artistic vision produced by the taste of the artist is executed through the artist's control of the tools to carry out her vision as she chooses, not as it chooses. The tool is interchangeable, the artist is not.

Human beings build technologies to eliminate friction. Under capitalism, efficiency becomes valuable independently of efficiency. As a result, we treat the minimum time needed to develop capacities as a defect. Generative AI extends that logic into domains where value actually resides (at least partly) in the expenditure of time and attention, i.e., things like practice, frustration, revision, discovery, and even just existing and experiencing life itself. The danger in automating away that effort is therefore larger than the production of bad or counterfeit artworks because it means outsourcing experiences whose value consisted partly in undergoing them in the first place.

There is a Serbian saying I heard often throughout my childhood,“Mrtvačko odelo nema džepove”, "A burial suit has no pockets". It was used when discussing the cheaper of my relatives, often to say that frugality is not inherently virtuous. Your money will not follow you into the grave no matter how much you hoard.

Such a saying comes to mind in this larger discussion of AI.

We hoard time. We chase endlessly after it in this gratuitous pursuit to achieve highest efficiency, all to save time. We are desperate to save time. No matter the cost, nor the deterioration of the present; all is expendable in order to save time — one can never have enough.

I suppose then, AI's growing presence as it continues to be integrated, was inevitable. The mass reliance on AI has purportedly removed all tedium in our lives and continues to consume. Everything is automated for us to save time.

And if I could ask, to what end?

What are we going to do with all this time saved?

Everything is automised by AI. The tedium that is communication; the tedium that is reading; the tedium that is writing; understanding; researching; developing relationships; developing skills or hobbies or taste; introspection; critical thought; expressing; learning; experiencing— all to save time.

Truly what do we have left to fill this time?

AI has now mechanized everything including, that with which we began our very existence —creating.

I think there was a moment when I realized my hatred for generative AI was more emblematic of my circumstances than I initially thought; and I was nostalgic for that single morsel of inconvenience we had left. Everything is done for us. However, art was still the singular thing we did for the sake of ourselves, in spite of its lacking automations. Even with the evolution of technology there was always hope in the tediousness of creating art. AI "art" snuffed out that intimate hope.

Though I can only speak from my own efforts, in everything I have come to create, behind me lies a mosaic of odd path diversions necessary to its creation; as baffling and seemingly trivial they seemed to be in the moment, I persisted regardless. In the steps of creation we realize the silliness in the moments of soberness, and we greet the absurdity of the process we’ve willingly found ourselves in, all so that art can exist.

Art in every single form is to capture the human condition and every aspect of it, but in every aspect of us, the human condition is to create. To live life, you are not to bypass doing. In a culture of immediacy, I implore you to sit with the discomfort that is the tedium of creation or to sit with the inconvenience that is tedium at all, and you will see the beauty it has.

We have always made the time. We have always found a way. To use AI is to deprive yourself this beauty of devotion to creating. To dedicating time.

There was a moment during its infancy where AI could not generate hands. Life-like amalgamations, uncanny replicas of their muse’s likeness, or eerie manifestations of their input prompts, were only distinguishable as AI by its inability to comprehend just how to properly generate hands. Too many fingers adorning oddly shaped palms that were flesh-coloured shapes mounted onto the ends of the figures’ arms; fingers webbed together, melting into one another as the AI could not detect where a finger separated from the others. Far too many would generate on hand overlapping one another or perhaps adorning too few fingers that protruded uncharacteristically from the wrist or the palm. And for however brief a moment it was, perhaps the final moments in which our humanity was still ours, the complexest machinery could not properly emulate our humanity that the unnamed Neanderthals, who had nothing but their hands and the desire to leave their mark, did.

 BIBLIOGRAPHY.

Duchamp, Marcel, and Marc Dachy. The Creative Act. Sub Rosa, 2000.

Marx, K. (1996). Das Kapital (F. Engels, Ed.). Regnery Publishing.

Norton, Louise. "Buddha of the Bathroom." The Blind Man, New York Dadaists, 1917, Issue 2

Sejten, Anne E. "Art Fighting its Way Back to Aesthetics Revisiting Marcel Duchamp's Fountain." Journal of Art Historiography, no. 15, 2016, pp. 1-8. ProQuest, http://ocadu.idm.oclc.org/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/art-fighting-way-back-aesthetics-revisiting/docview/1850136250/se-2.

Housefield, James. "Marcel Duchamp's Art and the Geography of Modern Paris*."Geographical Review, vol. 92, no. 4, 2002, pp. 477-502. ProQuest, http://ocadu.idm.oclc.org/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/marcel-duchamps-art-geography-modern-paris/docview/225333006/se-2.

Chauhan, A. (2024) ‘Redefining Artistic Boundaries: The Impact of Generative AI on Creative Processes and Innovation’, Authorea (Authorea) [Preprint]. Available at: https://doi.org/10.22541/au.172660510.02181160/v1.

AI Killed the Creative Arts - Chris Yoko (2024) Chrisyoko.com. Available at: https://www.chrisyoko.com/articles/ai-killed-the-creative-arts.

‌STILES, K. (2024) Artificial Intelligence is killing art, Northern Iowan. Available at: https://www.northerniowan.com/22060/opinion/artificial-intelligence-is-killing-art/.

‌Corrall, M. (2023) The harm & hypocrisy of AI art, Matt Corrall. Matt Corrall. Available at: https://www.corralldesign.com/writing/ai-harm-hypocrisy.

‌britannica (2019) ‘rock art | Definition & Facts | Britannica’, Encyclopædia Britannica. Available at: https://www.britannica.com/art/rock-art.

‌Kosmyna, N. et al. (2025) Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task, arXiv.org. Available at: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08872.

‌Pimenta, Tomás. (2020). Alienation and fetishism in Karl Marx’s critique of political economy. Nova Economia. 30. 605-628. 10.1590/0103-6351/4958.

Kadri, Jude. (2024). Alienation and the transformation of Value into Price in Karl Marx.

 And absolutely no use of AI, for the record.