You can't call people "luddites" for having taste
And anyway, all the obsession with tools is silly: amateurs obsess over tools, pros over mastery
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This article originally appeared on the Hot Takes here. I’m sharing it with The BoldBrush Letter because in it, Adam has explored an important topic for creative people.
Editor’s Note: In two days, this post will be locked and is available only to paid members because we don’t want this duplicate content on the open web in a way that might draw traffic away from Adam’s original post. If you are not a BoldBrush paid subscriber, you can still read the entire post here.
You can’t call people “luddites” for having taste
There’s a stupid comment I continually hear in the AI discourse, that anyone (typically someone with high aesthetic standards) who questions machine learning tools must be a “luddite.” It’s a lazy response by midtwits who don’t create art or culture, they optimize processes, pump assets for a living or flood the world with spam. No one who has made any creative work of consequence would say something like this. It’s an unserious comment, by unserious people.
These technologists look at creatives raising legitimate concerns about AI, or even just critique of its output, and conflate skepticism and having quality standards with ‘fear of progress.’ The opposite is true, they care about progress deeply. The simplest reply to any of them who would gleefully accept an Idiocracy-style future (because that’s all they know how to monetize) is ‘what have you made?’ It is assured anything they might have done creatively would be at home on the below screen.
Modern creative professionals are anything but luddites. They have been early adopters of technology for decades, likely more than the garden variety stock promoters making asinine statements. Today’s creatives use software, hardware, VSTs, effects processing, digital canvases, synthesizers, audio workstations. And the tools are wonderful, but the constant has always been a practiced eye for what works, a deep disdain for cheap facsimiles, and a commitment to craft and detail.
But even with this, it is still amateurs who obsess over tools, pros over mastery. A musician doesn’t idolize their DAW. A chef doesn’t credit their knife. You can wield the most sophisticated paintbrush or AI model and still produce utter garbage (and yes, the vast majority of ‘AI creators’ are just slop makers). Yet here we are in 2025, with “professionals” who have never wrestled with melody, edit, or story convinced that using an AI tool is a shortcut to genius. It’s like the fast food industrial complex lecturing the CIA (Culinary Institute of America) on efficiency because their process is quicker. Or, perhaps a scientist being called a luddite for raising concerns about gain of function research works too.
AI entrepreneurs do not actually democratize creativity. They commodify it, optimizing for clicks, volume, and algorithmic exploitation/success rather than for cultural resonance, meaning, or effort. They’re really just more clones of the professional-managerial class (PMC) who churn out beige corporate rebrands, as opposed to legitimately interesting ideas. Their “taste” is indistinguishable from a borg drone. They think they’re Rick Rubin without even understanding the man.
It’s true no one really cares how you create something. What matters is whether it’s interesting, meaningful, risky, or memorable. But tools don’t create that, the artist does. And creativity thrives on friction, on mistakes and imperfections, someone’s uniquely odd human quirks. Art is born from struggle, from earned mastery and obsessive attention to detail. As I shared previously, you can’t prompt your way to meaning, some friction is necessary for it. No one gets the same satisfaction out of microwaving a dinner vs making something from scratch. They’re not the same level of nutrition, either, even if they do sell to the masses. Never mistake any popularity of tech adoption for what actually stands the test of time, the banality of the crowd is real. It is unlikely many, if any Instagram-filtered pictures have much longevity when an algorithm is done with them.
That’s why we keep returning to films, books, and albums decades later made by people who risked both time and heart instead of chasing shortcuts or using automated outputs. Which raises a question: is it really virtuous to constantly spend your life searching for easier routes? History doesn’t reward shortcut seekers or get-rich-quick schemers, it broadly punishes them. That’s childish behavior. Consummate adults, the ones who resist legacy rot, try to make things better and higher quality, not cheaper. This actually frightens people who have been demoralized. Beautiful works, works that shine the light on individuality and humanity are like sunlight to a vampire here. These people simply do not grasp that artistic creation by definition is not efficient. The wandering, the mistakes, the process itself — that is the point. Certain types can’t stop asking “how do we make this faster?” when they should be asking “how do we make this mean more?” Meaning over volume will be the only cure for this spiritual obesity crisis.
I’ve talked about all this and where it leads before. In a previous story, I described the “Eloi” of the knowledge economy, those lazily surrendering to AI to do absolutely everything, will slowly become hollow shells. Comfortable, disconnected, and frankly nihilistic. We’ve since seen these very people launching AI spam operations. Meanwhile, the “Morlocks” who use AI and tech judiciously, mastering their craft and wielding tools with thought, retain the soul of creativity. The latter may look slower but they hold real power over the long term: in culture, knowledge, spiritual fulfillment. Their thinking has not been degraded.
AI, like any technology, could potentially amplify, assist, and augment. I compose electronic music myself using tech and creativity-fused tools that extend my vision, they do not replace it. But the moment you let the machine do all the work and you merely fiddle with prompts to render a finished product, you lose the vital human struggle, the sense of and ability to make something truly your own. There’s just not enough fine-tuned specificity and control. It works only if you are fine with ceding agency and having a work that’s merely average, the equivalent of stock art. That could be perfectly fine for something like B-roll in your indie movie. But here, it’s part of a larger product.
We can cheer the automation of mundane tasks, but it’s beyond moronic to think the wholesale automation of creative work is somehow the same as making art, and that deciding you don’t want to do that makes you a luddite. This relentless quest for optimization and “efficiency” in creativity would leave us in a sterile, soulless future where humans aren’t makers but mere spectators of machine outputs. Because at the end of the day, no AI will ever replace what happens when a living, breathing, imperfect human wrestles with their craft and makes something worth remembering. You’d really have to suffer from a terminal case of spreadsheet brain to believe otherwise.
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This is soooo good! Indeed, there’s no art without taking the pains to do things slowly and to follow the mysterious lead of Beauty.
I enjoyed this article. Thanks!
I would argue that AI does already "amplify, augment, and assist" the user ... PROVIDED the AI algorithm is applied in the way for which it is designed. It's been in use for about 30 years as an assistant to radiologists reading mammograms... the inputs are restricted to the image type for which the algorithm was designed.
I would also argue that AI turned loose in the public domain, without appropriate "guardrails", will soon churn out mud ( such as those "hallucinations" we hear about).
Garbage in = Garbage out.
Again, the article makes many excellent points regarding creativity and includes the ultimate reminder that the algorithm can neither replace nor perform as well as humans.