Why Every Creative Person Feels Slightly Obsolete Right Now

Lately I keep having this ugly little feeling that I’m standing in a checkout line watching somebody roll out a cheaper, shinier, mass-produced version of my personality, only it isn’t even my personality exactly, which would almost be flattering… it’s my skill set, my eye, my taste, the weird stubborn little instincts I spent years building because I thought that was the whole point of having a life in the first place.

You spend enough time becoming a writer or an artist or a designer and you start to believe, maybe stupidly, maybe sweetly, that this part is safe. Not financially safe (obviously not, that would be adorable), but spiritually safe. You assume the machines will come for the dead jobs first, the beige jobs, the antiseptic little spreadsheet jobs where nobody is allowed to have a soul anyway, not the soft twitchy animal part where you stare at a sentence for half an hour because one word feels too slick and another feels too clean and a third has exactly the right rotten undertow.

But the mood online lately, especially from people who treat convenience as a synonym for civilization, is that creativity was mostly a production bottleneck. As if the real problem with art was that it took too long and involved too many difficult humans with rent and moods and strange fixations and inconvenient standards. As if the dream future is one where everything arrives instantly, bright and competent and frictionless, without the exhausting inconvenience of anyone having to live through anything before making something out of it.

And that is such a bleak little fantasy when you say it out loud. It has the emotional texture of an airport Marriott lobby. It’s efficient, yes; it’s optimized; it’s also the exact opposite of why most of us fell in love with art in the first place, which was not because it was streamlined or scalable or capable of generating sixteen variations before lunch, but because it felt charged, and strange, and intimate, like another human being had crawled halfway into your skull and left a lantern burning there.

The Etsy moment

Last month I was looking for a specific kind of soft-textured illustration reference (trying to figure out why a client’s kid-book rough was reading as cold when the drawing itself was technically solid), and I went down an Etsy rabbit hole, the way you do at 1am when Margaux (my cat, male, orange, named after a white wine at 2am at a friend’s house, don’t start) is asleep on your feet and Franz (the fish) is doing his weird little hovering thing that means he is either dying or bored. And I found a shop selling prints in what I can only describe as my exact aesthetic. Not adjacent. Not similar. Mine. The limited palette I spent a year narrowing down. The specific line weight I use because my hand cramps otherwise. The overcorrected watercolor bleeding I love because it reads as “honest” instead of “wet.”

It was AI. It was obviously AI once you looked. The hands were wrong in the way AI hands are wrong. The letters on a little painted sign in one of the prints were the soft hieroglyphic nonsense you get when a model decides to simulate writing without actually generating language. But the surface of it was so exact that for a second I thought: oh, somebody found me. Then: oh, somebody ate me.

The price was three dollars. It was a Tuesday.

The market was never on our side

Most artists were already broke. The market was never on our side. The last twenty years of “creative economy” discourse was mostly a way of getting us to produce more for less while calling it freedom. The machines didn’t kill the middle-class illustrator; the middle-class illustrator was bleeding out for a decade before anyone learned what a diffusion model was. What AI did was make the pace of the bleeding impossible to ignore. The ground was already tilted. The flood just moved faster.

This isn’t me being nihilistic. I’m actually (weirdly) not in a doom-scroll mood about it right now. I woke up this morning in the part of Austin where the bats come out from under the Congress Avenue bridge at sunset, I walked to Radio Coffee, I paid seven dollars for a drink I know how to make at home, I read a chapter of a Leonora Carrington biography in which she nearly got institutionalized in Spain for having a psychotic break that was also, somehow, the exact material her later paintings came out of, and I thought: well, you can’t automate that. You can automate the surface of her work. You cannot automate the century of her life. You cannot automate the fact that she kept painting until she was 94 because she had no other way of being a person.

That’s the part I keep coming back to. The uncopyable part is the life pressed into the thing from the inside.

What AI actually replaces (and what it doesn’t)

Let me be useful for a second, because this is a thing I’ve been thinking about as a working freelancer and not just as a person having feelings at midnight. AI is eating the middle of every creative skill. Not the top. Not the bottom. The middle.

The top is the work that is strange, specific, time-intensive, personal, idiosyncratic, genuinely surprising. That tier is mostly safe, not because machines can’t imitate the surface of it, but because the people who want that kind of work want the humanness of it as part of what they are buying. They are buying access to a specific brain that made a specific thing. They are not buying a visual output. They are buying evidence.

The bottom is the “make me a quick flyer” work. That tier is also mostly safe in a backhanded way; it was already underpaid, already a race to the bottom, and now the bottom has a tool that costs three cents per generation, fine. Nobody who paid thirty dollars for a logo was going to pay three hundred for one that was “human-made” anyway. Those clients were never in the real economy to begin with.

The middle is where the knife lands. The solid-but-not-spectacular illustration gig. The competent freelance design job. The “can you write me a listicle about office chairs” article. The stuff that was never someone’s soul but was absolutely paying their rent. That work is going, and it’s going fast, and anyone pretending otherwise is either not a working artist or very rich.

I say this as someone who still has a practical writing gig pay part of her rent this month, so I am not being theoretical. I am telling you what I see with my own invoicing spreadsheet.

The real insult (not excellence, erosion)

What actually grinds you down, though, isn’t excellence. I can live with excellence. I like excellence. I like freakishly talented people. I like seeing something so good it makes me want to throw my own notebook into the sea and go lie face-down on the floor for an hour.

What grinds you down is not greatness. It’s the endless flood of things that are merely fine from far away. Work that looks finished at thumbnail size. Work that gives off the correct genre fumes. Work that behaves like art the way a showroom behaves like a home; staged, spotless, with a pillow on every surface and a vase of dried flowers no one will ever water.

The internet is now fully tiled with this stuff. I open a Pinterest board someone sent me and every other image is a gorgeous dead thing. I open a Substack discovery page and half the “art” columns are clearly running on generated assets. I open Instagram and the reels auto-play into something that looks beautiful for about one second before a kind of uncanny texture-rot sets in… the way a wax apple looks right until you pick it up and it’s too light in your hand.

Audiences still know. I want to be clear about that. They know in the body before they know with their minds. They register the wrongness as a feeling, a faint nausea of unreality, the same feeling you get in an AirBnB that was “designed” by somebody who’s been “designing” for six months and has opinions about “scandi.” They don’t have the vocabulary for it yet. But they know.

The problem is they’re drowning in so much of it that the signal-to-noise ratio has broken. It’s harder and harder to find the human work underneath. You have to dig. You have to learn to dig. And a lot of people, understandably, are too tired. They just take the surface. They take the dead-but-pretty thing because scrolling is cheaper than searching. And every time that happens, the human artist one tier below gets a little less oxygen.

The Leonora Carrington argument

I keep returning to Leonora Carrington because her story is the argument I can’t stop making. She was a British-Mexican Surrealist painter who lived a life so strange (war, refugee-hood, a psychotic break documented in her own writing, a seventy-year painting career in Mexico City, alchemy books, cats, a son she loved, a late-career publishing renaissance) that her work cannot be separated from her biography in any meaningful way. The paintings are a precipitate of that life. They are not illustrations of it. They are the residue.

A model can generate a Leonora Carrington-looking image. You can type “surrealist painting, horse-headed figures, Celtic iconography, Mexican modernist palette” into any of the usual machines and get something that, at a thumbnail, passes. You cannot generate a Leonora Carrington painting because a Leonora Carrington painting requires Leonora Carrington to have existed. The output is only half the object. The other half is the evidence of a specific human who kept choosing this specific form of labor under a specific set of pressures for ninety-four years. That isn’t a style. That’s a life. And a life is not something you can prompt.

This is, weirdly, the argument for making work right now even when it feels pointless. The output is never the whole object. The output has always been the sediment of the work. Which means the thing the machines can’t actually replace isn’t the picture or the paragraph. It’s the years. The evidence. The slow laying-down of choices that mean something because the person who made them was afraid and broke and in love and specifically herself.

I don’t know if that’s comforting. Some days it is. Some days it just sounds like the thing you tell yourself to keep going.

The digital nomad fantasy doesn’t save us either

There’s a version of this conversation where the fix is: move somewhere cheap, go full remote, become a digital nomad with a lower cost base, work less, make more meaningful things. My friend Paula, who has an actual job in tech and pays for her own groceries, has sent me approximately forty-seven reels of women “making art in the Algarve” or “slow-living in Oaxaca” and I have absorbed all of them and they have not saved me.

The geography is not the problem. The problem is that the cultural position of creative work has shifted, and moving to a cheaper place with a better view of a mountain does not change that shift. It just means you’re being culturally deranked in a prettier room. You can tell because every time one of those digital-nomad artists gets famous enough to have a business, they start running the same AI-juiced content calendar as everyone else. The landscape doesn’t protect you. The flight abroad is not a flight out.

(That said. I do still look at Oaxaca sometimes. I’m not made of stone.)

What to do, if you’re asking, which you might not be

I don’t want to end this with a listicle or a prescription because I hate it when essays do that and then you’re left with five bullet points that feel like pre-written closing lines from a LinkedIn post. But a few things I’ve been doing that I think are actually working, or at least keeping me from spiraling:

I stopped trying to compete with the volume. I make fewer things. I make them weirder. I let the weirdness be the unique selling proposition instead of pretending I have a “process.” The process is I get sad, I get obsessed, I make a thing.

I read more. Books, not feeds. The way your eye recalibrates after half an hour of actual prose is wild; it’s like I can feel the gelatin of my attention firming back up. I recieved a stack of used Clarice Lispector from a friend last month and I have been rereading the same three paragraphs at night instead of scrolling, and I can feel my taste sharpening, which matters more than any new tool I could learn.

I’ve started linking to real people’s work. When I love something, I say so, with their name, with a link to their site. I think a big part of what rots about the current internet is that everyone’s in broadcast mode and nobody’s in citation mode, and citation mode is the oldest survival tactic writers have. If you want to know one working writer-artist in my city whose stuff makes me feel like the medium is not dead, go read Austin Kleon. I know, I know, everyone already reads him, but the weekly newsletter is one of maybe three things in my inbox I actually open, and his bit on “work made while you were paying attention” has been taking up space in my head for months.

I’ve given up on neat endings. (You might have noticed.) I keep a note in my phone that just says “let it be unfinished” because I think a lot of what I used to call my style was actually just my willingness to over-polish until it was dead, and being around AI-generated text has made me allergic to the specific smoothness of anything that’s been “finalized.” A little roughness is the tell. A little drag in the rhythm is evidence that a real person stayed long enough to get bored.

And mostly I’ve been trying to remember that the doom spiral, the “we’re all obsolete, it’s over, nothing we make matters” spiral, is also a kind of AI slop. It’s a premade feeling. It arrives in the same pre-formed shape in everyone’s chest at the same time every week. It’s the thing you’re supposed to feel when you open your feed. Refusing it is kind of a small political act now, maybe the only one available at 2am while your cat digs his claws into your thigh.

Margaux, the cat, for the record, does not care about any of this. He cares about the exact temperature of my laptop fan and whether there is tuna. He is not worried about AI. He is definately not worried about the future of the freelance illustration market. He would like me to stop typing and pay attention to him. This is possibly the most emotionally intelligent creature in the house.

I’m going to close the laptop in a minute. I’m going to go look at the one weird messy painting I still like under the bed. Tomorrow I will open it again and probably feel the same way I feel every time AI makes something in my style; a little sick, a little angry, a little determined to make the next thing stranger than anything a model could reach.

Which is, annoyingly, a better reason to make work than I had before any of this started.