I’ve always avoided products marketed explicitly as “woke free” because I see that messaging in the same way I see the virtue signaling of those garrulous “In This House, We Believe,” yard signs. The conscious effort to attract people based on politics rather than quality makes me suspicious because it suggests content over craft. That’s not always the case, but I think it’s a healthy rule of thumb. I felt vindicated when I saw Jeremy Boreing, the chief executive of Jeremy’s Razors and co-founder of The Daily Wire, announce that his companies would embrace artificial intelligence with open arms. 

On X, Boreing shared a commercial for Jeremy’s Razors that came off like a fever dream. A caveman plucks a shaving razor from a meteorite and morphs into various heroic figures, including a George Washington lookalike, and then into a guy named “Steve.” They’re beset by a shaggy Karl Marx and man bun-sporting hipsters. It’s not a bad concept if you’re targeting conservative men. But it provokes that feeling of venturing through the uncanny valley. It looks like cheap, inhuman slop, because it was made with AI. Boreing bragged that it only cost $47 to produce, whereas human hands would have required about a million dollars for their labor. Well, you get what you pay for. But what struck me most was something he said near the end of his tweet: “AI will not replace humans, but it will replace humans who don’t embrace AI.” 

“Fighting the future is a fool’s errand,” he added. “AI is here. We intend to use it.” It’s true—you can’t fight the future. But completely outsourcing creativity to algorithms would be a grave mistake and nothing short of a betrayal of what makes us human. 

It also doesn’t make much sense if you consider yourself a culture warrior, as Boreing does, because you’re endorsing the death of human culture. The word comes to us from the Latin cultus, which signified both the cultivating of the soil and religious worship. “Common cultivation of crops, common defense, cooperation in much else—these are the rudiments of a people’s culture,” Russell Kirk wrote. “If that culture succeeds, it may grow into a civilization.” These are fundamentally human things, as humans are the only creatures endowed with the capacity for them. Only we, among all the animals, can express ourselves artistically, from cave paintings to the sublimity of Michelangelo’s frescoes. Cutting the human out of the creative process—out of culture—is a bit like refusing the fire of creative power snatched by Prometheus for mankind. In a very real sense, it threatens to destroy our collective psyche—our mind and spirit. AI poses the possibility of new horizons; yes, it’s true. Its capacity to manage large, complex systems and spearhead technical breakthroughs is indeed potentially enormous. But it’s a Faustian bargain. Knowledge powered by magic in exchange for delayed slavery.

Back in 2021, Henry Kissinger partnered with former Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt and Daniel Huttenlocher, the inaugural dean of the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing, to write a book called The Age of AI: And Our Human Future. They likened the AI revolution to the printing revolution in 15th-century Europe, which disrupted established patterns of life but also let blossom new ideas. The implications of AI in our time, however, are far more seismic than anything we’ve seen before, they wrote, because it will fundamentally alter not only how we communicate with each other, but how we perceive and interact with reality itself:

By helping humanity navigate the sheer totality of digital information, AI will open unprecedented vistas of knowledge and understanding. Alternatively, its discovery of patterns in masses of data may produce a set of maxims that become accepted as orthodoxy across continental and global network platforms. This, in turn, may diminish humans’ capacity for skeptical inquiry that has defined the current epoch. Further, it may channel certain societies and network-platformed communities into separate and contradictory branches of reality. 

I think this trend will be facilitated and accelerated by the collapse of institutional trust. The “experts” have done a good job of sowing the seeds of contempt and distrust for themselves by using their positions to tell untruths. A machine, on the other hand, wouldn’t lie to you. It has no ideological agenda, nor can it accept kickbacks or act in the interest of guarding its sinecure. Those are all good things, of course. But what about the people who, for as long as it is possible to do so, control the machine? An inquiry into their misdeeds would require a healthy degree of skepticism. The problem with AI is that we would gradually lose our ability, or even our desire, to ask such questions about the world around us. This will happen as we outsource our faculties and curiosity to it, effectively building a digital cage around ourselves. For all its promise to enrich our lives and add to our understanding, “AI subtracts.” It takes from us and slowly erodes us over time, like waves breaking on cliff faces. The authors write:

It hastens dynamics that erode human reason as we have come to understand it: social media, which diminishes the space for reflections, and online searching, which decreases the impetus for conceptualization. Pre-AI algorithms were good at delivering “addictive” content to humans. AI is excellent at it. As deep reading and analysis contracts, so, too, do the traditional rewards for undertaking these processes. As the cost of opting out of the digital domain increases, its ability to affect human thought—to convince, to steer, to divert—grows. As a consequence, the individual human’s role in reviewing, testing, and making sense of information diminishes. In its place, AI’s role expands.

In other words, we become cognitively diminished. A new kind of two-tiered society emerges, with those who have control over the screens of power at the top and all the rest below. Creativity is vital in this context because it is one means of resisting that diminishment. The wholesale falsification of artistic endeavors would mean the total surrender of the self to digital swarms. I’m reminded of a short story by Robert Chambers called “The Mask,” which appears in his 1895 collection The King in Yellow. Though Chambers is less known than H. P. Lovecraft, he had a powerful influence on the genre of supernatural horror. Lovecraft described the genre as creating “a profound sense of dread, and of contact with unknown spheres and powers.” It’s a literary form that seems to suit the age of AI quite well. 

“The Mask” follows a sculptor named Boris, his girlfriend Geneviève, and Alec, a painter. They lead decadent, indulgent lives as artists in the fin de siècle world of 19th-century Paris, at the height of that era’s social degeneracy and escapism. Boris has derived a solution from a forbidden text that allows him to convert any living thing—plant or animal—into flawless marble. All the sculptor has to do is dip an object into the translucent liquid, and it is instantly, dazzlingly, and effortlessly transformed into a perfect sculpture. Boris is amused by the awesome power he wields in his hands. Alec and Geneviève are more wary about the forces he’s meddling with. Boris, who has already made one statue in Geneviève’s likeness, proposes another, leaving Alec to wonder if Boris might give Geneviève an alchemical bath. What Boris does not realize until it is too late is that he has lost Geneviève, who eventually professes her secret love for Alec. The revelation leads to the sculptor committing suicide and Geneviève’s throwing herself into a pool of the solution, transforming herself into a marble statue. 

I think the point Chambers wanted to make with this story is that, by falsifying his art through the subversion of reality, Boris lost not only his love, Geneviève, but himself. The human part of Boris turned to stone as he turned lilies, live rabbits, and fish into marble. Geneviève’s decision to throw herself into the liquid was really her way of accepting what she had already become: a living statue and something to be iterated upon by an algorithm of sorts. 

Boreing is right. The future is now. But that does not mean that we must consign ourselves to the most troubling aspects of it or, worse, embrace those things. Resistance will require a renewed appreciation for and patronage of art—real, human art. I think this is underway now. There’s already a move toward real-life spaces, a growing rebellion of writers, painters, sculptors, filmmakers, and others who refuse to accept human obsolescence. In the words of Longfellow, “The Promethean fire is burning.”  ◆