Post-AI

The Shifting Conversation

In the arts, the conversation around AI has undergone a radical metamorphosis. Initially, there was profound opposition – rage at how AI's training consumed the work of other artists, reducing their creative output to mere "styles" that could be applied without regard to copyright or intellectual property.

But many artists have since moved beyond this debate and are exploring AI's new terrain. Some craft unexpected images through innovative prompting techniques. Others use multiple AI tools throughout their creative process. Still others engage with AI as a collaborator in their creative endeavors, viewing the machine as partner rather than tool.

For these artists, AI is no longer an emerging technology but simply another element in their creative toolkit – a given medium with its own unique characteristics and affordances, like paint, or a camera, or code before it.

One might describe these artists as working in a "Post-AI" context since, for them, the revolution is over, a thing of the past, merely history. But when I use the term "Post-AI," I intend something very different: the era when we collectively recognize AI's regressive nature, when the hype has passed, and when we've broken away past this current technological moment.

Beyond AI Hype

If we believe the techno-myths of AGI and singularities – that AI represents the ultimate technology – then AI becomes the final creative technology, the culmination of all human innovation in the artistic realm. It would mark a Fukuyama-like "end of artistic history" – where creative evolution stops advancing and we become mere caretakers of the museum of human expression.

But I posit that this is fundamentally wrong. AI is not the endpoint of creative evolution – it's a regression disguised as progress.

AI is an inherently backwards-looking technology. It has been trained on close to the sum total of all human creativity that has been digitized. Its methods – essentially predicting creations based on that history – mean that it can only create by shuffling the cards of content that came before it. Everything it produces is little more than clever nostalgia dressed in technological novelty. Some might argue that all human creativity involves reinterpreting what came before. But that ignores the unexpected breakthroughs, and the cultural shifts, that push creativity in genuinely new directions.

If we were to accept AI as the final technology, then everything created with it would be some recombination of what has come before. The implications are profound: it would signal the end of human creativity as we understand it and, by extension, the end of art as a forward-moving cultural force. Art would become an endless cycle of remixes and references, cleverly disguised but fundamentally derivative.

This vision of creative stagnation – a permanent museum of algorithmic variations on past human achievement – is what awaits us if we accept the narrative of AI supremacy. But there is an alternative path.

Beyond Predictive Machines

I do not believe that AI is the end. There will be something after AI. And it will be from that something that the next great change in creativity will emerge.

What comes next? Where will the truly new emerge from?

Perhaps it will arise from a fundamental human impulse that resists technological determinism. Or perhaps from a new post-AI technology such as quantum computing – its non-binary approach to information processing might yield artistic possibilities we cannot yet imagine. What might unpredictable systems yield when they harness the strange reality of quantum principles?

The fundamental nature of quantum computing represents something AI systems cannot comprehend or replicate. Current AI operates on classical computation – deterministic, binary, and fundamentally predictable despite its complexity. But quantum systems embrace uncertainty at their core. They work with superpositions rather than definite states, entanglement rather than separation, and probability rather than certainty. While AI excels at finding patterns in historical data, quantum systems thrive on states that haven't yet collapsed into definition – the realm of pure possibility.

This distinction isn't merely technical but philosophical. AI systems, no matter how sophisticated, remain imprisoned within the paradigm of classical computing. They cannot "think" outside their deterministic architecture to understand quantum principles because they operate through deterministic processes fundamentally incompatible with the indeterminacy intrinsic to quantum systems

The leap from classical to quantum represents not just an upgrade but a paradigm shift – a genuine epistemological break rather than an incremental improvement. This is precisely why quantum computing offers a potential path toward Post-AI creativity – it operates on principles fundamentally alien to current AI systems, creating a space where human creativity might find new forms of expression beyond algorithmic prediction.

Is creativity inherently driven by technology? David Byrne, in his book "How Music Works," would argue yes – that the creative products of any era are shaped by the technological affordances available to creators. In the visual arts, photography offers a clear parallel – when it emerged in the 19th century, it fundamentally transformed painting, pushing artists beyond representation toward impressionism, expressionism, and eventually abstraction as they sought new territory that cameras couldn't capture.

Yet the relationship works both ways. Throughout history, artists have driven technological innovation rather than merely responding to it. At Bell Laboratories in the 1960s, engineers and artists including Robert Rauschenberg and Jean Tinguely collaborated on groundbreaking projects through Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.), developing new technologies specifically to realize artistic visions. This artistic experimentation became a catalyst for technological breakthroughs that would later find broader applications beyond the art world.

Meanwhile, today, AI is causing undeniable problems in our society: post-truth discourse, deepfakes that undermine our sense of reality, the erosion of trust in media. The internet itself is becoming polluted with AI-generated content, creating a hall of mirrors where reality becomes increasingly distant. Our disconnect from authentic experience grows deeper as synthetic content floods the web.

Do we fight AI-generated misinformation with "better" AI? Do we answer large language models with larger language models? This approach keeps us trapped in the same flawed paradigm. Instead, Post-AI begins when we break free from the hype cycle, recognize the inherent limitations of regression-based systems, and engage with fundamentally different approaches to technology and creativity.

Reclaiming Human Possibility

Do we really want AI embedded into every technological product we use? This question challenges the assumed inevitability of AI's integration into all aspects of life. The uncritical adoption of AI represents not inevitability but a choice – one we are making collectively, often without deliberate consideration.

This is the essence of Post-AI: an awareness that emerges when we collectively recognize the regressive nature of current AI systems and the inflated hype finally dissipates. It's not about rejecting technology altogether, but about seeing through the marketing narratives to understand what these systems actually are: sophisticated pattern-matching machines limited to recombining what already exists – with all their inherent flaws, systemic biases, and dangerous perpetuation of harmful stereotypes intact.

The Post-AI stance involves transcending our current technological moment. The next wave of creative breakthroughs won't come from perfecting prompts or training larger models. It will emerge from domains that algorithmic systems fundamentally cannot access – realms where principles of uncertainty, nonlinearity, and emergence operate in ways that deterministic systems cannot comprehend or replicate.

Post-AI creativity materializes when we shift focus from what AI can do toward exploring what comes after these systems – when we break from the algorithmic hall of mirrors and rediscover genuine novelty. It arrives when pattern-matching systems are positioned appropriately: as tools subordinated to human vision and intention, not as autonomous creative entities or partners.

The future doesn't lie in optimizing regression-based prediction systems. It lies in what comes after: the reassertion of the unpredictable, the genuinely novel, and the uniquely human capacity for conceptual leaps that remain beyond algorithmic comprehension.

To be clear: Post-AI is not what some artists are already practicing – the casual integration of AI into existing workflows, treating it as just another tool. That approach, while pragmatic, accepts AI's limitations rather than transcending them. True Post-AI consciousness emerges when we collectively awaken from the hypnotic spell of AI capabilities and recognize both its inherent regression and the vast creative territories that lie beyond its reach. Post-AI is that undefined territory – but one far more vital than the deterministic future being packaged and sold by the same corporations that transformed the open internet into extractive monopolies.