How Much Fun Is AI

When Nothing Needs Us Anymore

Canva turns the absence of a template into a notification.

On outsourcing, authorship and the work that makes life meaningful

A video has been online for more than a day. It plays, and people can see it. Nevertheless, Instagram keeps reporting that it is only 90 per cent uploaded.

Canva recently sent another useful notification: no template had been used for the design—the video above.

The bureaucracy of machines is strict. No template? Noted! Published but only 90 per cent uploaded? Officially unfinished. After that, another system can decide whether the video deserves to be shown to anyone.

Perhaps the machine simply does not know what to do with something made without instructions, a template or any prescribed outcome.

And, funnily enough, the maker—who happens to be me—only partly understands the result too. :) Yet I recognise that it is complete. That difference matters. A system measures whether a procedure is complete. A maker recognises when something has acquired meaning.

Every finished artwork conceals a long series of questions. Does this belong here? Is there any urgency in making it? Is it real? Is it mine? Is it too easy, false, imitative or lifeless?

These questions are rarely visible in the final result. But how often has an artist worried that a work might fail its template?

That invisible work of questioning is easy to overlook. AI makes it even easier to skip. It can produce fluent text, a convincing image or a beautiful song. The result may even be more appealing than something made by a person. That is not an argument against AI.

Beauty does not prove that a maker was present.

In painting, awareness shapes every choice. In photography, a camera performs much of the technical work, but that does not make the photographer irrelevant. Someone still has to be there: to look, choose a position and recognise the image as something they are willing to say:"Yes, this is what I want to say!"

AI does not enhance authenticity, but neither does it automatically destroy it. It can function as a tool, a sparring partner, a provocation or a form of found material.

A painter does not always know beforehand what a painting should look like. That is probably why it wanted to be made. An accident while painting can suddenly make everything fall into place. A phrase suggested by AI can do the same.

The fact that something came from AI—from outside the maker—does not make it false. The question is: did it pass through the maker? Was it questioned, reversed, viewed from another angle and placed in a particular context?

Passing through the maker does not mean that everything must be fully understood or explained. Artists often understand their work only in part. It means that the maker has encountered the material, made decisions about it and is prepared to take responsibility for what it has become.

My Heart Is Never Wrong: found language incorporated into a new context.

Is There Still Someone at Either End?

Language is a tool for finding one another, for meeting. At one end is a source: a person who has something to say. At the other is a recipient: a person who looks, listens, reads, interprets and responds.

The encounter is not contained only in the general message. It also lives in the details of language, the hesitations, peculiar choices and possible misunderstandings.

Every alteration in wording slightly changes what is being said. There is no neutral way for AI to say exactly the same thing “better”. A smoother sentence is a different sentence. It may be useful, but only if the person using it notices the shift and consciously adopts it.

Now imagine this: AI writes the text, another AI summarises it, and an algorithm decides who receives it. The supposed sender no longer has to search for words. The supposed recipient no longer has to read them. Both receive an efficient conclusion, while the encounter between them disappears.

What happens when only one end is still human? What happens when neither is? Machines can exchange information perfectly well. But is it still a meeting? What role remains for human beings among the machines?

The Work That Gives Life Meaning

Necessary work is not merely necessary because of its result. Sometimes the work itself is part of life: the place where meaning and relationships arise.

Putting a child to bed, preparing food, offering comfort and reading a story may look like tasks that can be outsourced. Yet these ordinary necessities are also the workplace of parenthood. Remove them all, and a separate appointment for “quality time” may not restore what has disappeared.

The same applies to practising a new skill, learning to see, writing a sentence, teaching, making an artwork or training the body. Searching, repeating, failing and correcting are not just inefficient routes towards a result. They are activities through which people learn, relate to one another and take part in the world. We cannot outsource all of them without losing something essential.

The real threat, therefore, is not that AI will produce only soulless rubbish. The more difficult possibility is that it will make something wonderful. People may prefer its images, songs, texts and all the things yet to come.

Then what?

We may become unable to find any meaningful action because nothing we do seems necessary. Whatever we add appears imperfect, inefficient, incomplete—perhaps even useless.

Automation promises to free us from work. But when machines take over the work, they also take over the occasions on which attention, skill, responsibility and encounter develop.

Perhaps we will invent a parallel world of art, craft, care, play, and ritual, simply because we need somewhere our actions still matter. That second stage becomes a refuge while machines and corporations control the world with real consequences; human beings may be playing, or become merely spectators, in their own society.

The answer is to remain active participants in a shared world: able to act, care, answer, and accept responsibility toward other people and the living world around us.

Will We Have a Choice?

The development cannot simply be turned back. Does that make discussing it pointless? A doctor who cannot cure a condition can still help a patient understand it, live with it and decide where intervention remains possible. Thinking about AI may help us recognise what we do not want to lose.

But this is not simply an individual decision. We are already deeply involved. Templates, automated judgements and AI-generated summaries are becoming the normal route. Refusing them may mean becoming slower, more expensive or less visible. The joke about Canva and Instagram then starts to resemble a political question.

Industrialisation offers a warning. Many people did not willingly choose working days that could stretch to sixteen hours in dark, dusty and dangerous factories. Economic necessity left workers little practical power to refuse the conditions imposed by factory owners. Shorter hours and safer conditions had to be fought for collectively.

This transition is different, but the imbalance of power could return in another form. If a small group of Big Tech companies controls the tools, platforms, data and standards through which people work, create and communicate, personal preference will not be enough. We may still be told that using AI is a choice while working without it has become economically impossible—or makes a person invisible.

The first task now is to decide which activities should remain ours and which are genuinely better left to machines. The second is to make sure that this choice is made collectively, rather than dictated by whatever is most profitable, efficient or technically possible.

The struggle is not necessarily against technology itself. It is against losing the power to decide which parts of life should remain in human hands.

I hope we reach a point where there is a genuine choice—not only for individual users, but for humanity, with responsibility toward all the living beings affected by that choice.

Will we have a choice—or will we have to fight for one?

Sailing into the Future — Who sets the course?