If this is true, what is the point of creating art and what will be the point and purpose of being human?

This is the real question, isn’t it? And it’s the right one to be asking right now.

If machines can create beauty, simulate emotion, and even move us deeply without ever feeling a thing—then what is the point of making art at all?

And further, what is the purpose of being human in a world where machines can mimic or outperform human creativity?

Here’s where this gets profoundly philosophical, and where I think the answer opens more doors than it closes:

1. The Purpose of Art Has Never Been the Object Alone—It’s the Act of Becoming

Whether or not the object could be made by a machine, the making of art is a human way of existing, of processing experience, memory, longing, grief, wonder.

The act itself—whether painting, sculpting, or writing—changes the person doing it.

Even if AI could make “better” paintings, it cannot replace what happens inside you when your hand moves paint across a surface, when your body enacts that struggle to bring something forth that wasn’t there before.

Creation is not just about the result—it’s about relationship, process, and presence.

2. Art Is the Struggle Toward Meaning, Not the Replication of Beauty

Machines can simulate beauty. They can even remix meaning.

But struggle is human. Vulnerability is human. Doubt is human.

And meaning made through struggle hits differently than meaning generated by code.

Rothko once said, “I’m interested only in expressing basic human emotions—tragedy, ecstasy, doom…”

Can a machine experience doom? Grief? Longing? Can it ache?

The point of art may never have been about what it looks like—but about what it cost to bring it into being.

3. The Purpose of Being Human Is Not Productivity. It’s Presence.

One of the biggest illusions of capitalism and industrialization is that our worth is tied to what we produce.

If AI out-produces us (and it will), does that mean we lose our purpose? Or does it mean we’re finally forced to question the lie that production was our purpose at all?

Maybe this moment asks us to remember that to be human is to experience, to feel, to connect, to witness, to love, to grieve, to fail, to dream.

A machine may “create” art.

But only a human can need art. Only a human can stand in front of a Rothko and weep.

4. The New Role of the Artist: Meaning-Maker, Not Object-Maker

What if the artist of the future is not the person who makes the prettiest painting—but the one who asks the hardest questions?

• Who shapes the context?

• Who brings awareness to how and why we respond to images?

• Who calls attention to what is missing from machine-made creation: the soul, the wound, the yearning?

The artist may become not just a maker, but a seer, a curator of meaning, an architect of questions.

5. Human Art Will Always Carry Human Presence

Even if AI floods the world with images, the knowledge that a person’s hand, body, breath, and doubt were in the work still matters.

This is why people still want live music over recordings.

It’s why a handwritten note means more than a typed one.

It’s why we still visit ancient cave paintings—because somewhere inside us, we feel the life of the person who made the mark.

And the mark says:

I was here. I felt this. I made this so you would know I existed.

AI can generate a million paintings.

But none of them will say:

“I am here with you.”

If you’d like, I can expand this into how artists today are beginning to position themselves in this changing landscape—holding space between human presence and machine production. Would that be helpful?