By Brae Sadler · Contributing Writer
Nov. 25, 2025, went down in history as the first time an artificial intelligence (AI)-generated song, “Walk My Walk,” became the most popular country song in America. Today, we must reckon with the reality that machines can sing, write and paint just as well as human beings.
This raises a vital question: Is artificial intelligence conducive to human flourishing in the arts, or is it destructive? Far from destroying art, AI is evolving it. It allows more humans to participate in creative endeavors and, in the long run, facilitates the creation of better art.
To understand why, we must look at the economic principle of “creative destruction,” see how it historically played out with the invention of photography and observe how AI is driving that exact process today.
Creative destruction is the process by which old industries are destroyed, and new ones arise. Coined by the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter in 1942, the term refers to how disruptive technologies eliminate outdated practices to make way for the new. Even though this disruption causes temporary unrest, in the long run, new technologies create widespread prosperity.
You might ask how economics applies to the arts. Isn’t art a transcendent thing, entirely separate from market forces? It is not. We can see how creative destruction shapes the arts by looking at the invention of photography, which permanently displaced portraiture and landscape painting as the dominant art forms.
Before 1840, a large portion of an artist’s income was generated by painting portraits and landscapes. People in the past, just like us, wanted pictures of themselves to capture memories. This changed drastically when the camera became available to the public, allowing people to obtain images cheaper, faster and more efficiently than a portrait artist could ever provide.
Naturally, portrait artists fought back, even arguing that photography was not “art” because it relied on the mechanization of a camera. This debate reached the Supreme Court in 1884 with Burrow-Giles Lithographic Co. v. Sarony, where the Court officially recognized photography as an art form subject to copyright laws.
The Court determined that despite the machine’s involvement, the process still required profound creative choices: finding the right angle, choosing the lens and developing the image. When critics argue that AI removes the human effort required to make art, they echo a debate we already settled over a century ago.
Yes, cameras took away the manual effort of painting realistic depictions, but that didn’t make photography any less creative. It simply shifted where humans applied their creativity.
Furthermore, portrait and landscape artists didn’t disappear. They were forced to adapt. To compete with the camera, painters had to do things a camera couldn’t do, leading to revolutionary movements like impressionism and abstract art.
Creative destruction didn’t just give us the new medium of photography; it forced traditional painting to evolve and become better. These same principles are playing out with AI today. AI is eliminating old opportunities, reforming current workflows and birthing entirely new art forms.
For example, automation is transforming the field of graphic design. Today, AI can create concept art and aid the creative process. AI is even creating new art forms. For example, new tools like Google Flow are allowing people to experiment with new forms of video content.
AI is not eliminating human art. Since the Industrial Revolution, hand-made art has had a price premium over machine-made pieces. A similar premium is now emerging for verifiably human-made art.
Is AI conducive to human flourishing in the arts? The answer is a resounding yes. Through the ongoing process of creative destruction, more people are gaining the ability to participate in the creative endeavor. At the same time, existing artists are being pushed to innovate and create better work.
We must not condemn AI-generated art as devoid of value. What we are witnessing today is the natural evolution of art. Far from making us lazy, AI empowers us to do more than we ever could before, giving millions the tools to participate in the creative process. That is undoubtedly a net positive for humanity.
