The rise of generative artificial intelligence has forced an old question back into urgent focus: what is art and why do we make it?
Fantasy author Brandon Sanderson reasoned, during a speech he made at the recent Tailored Realities release event at Dragonsteel Nexus that AI had pushed society to confront this more seriously than ever before.
“We’re being forced to ask ourselves about art in a way we never have before,” he said, pointing to moments such as the AI-generated song Walk My Walk reaching number one on Billboard’s Digital Country Songs chart, and novelist Mark Lawrence’s experiment in which readers could not reliably distinguish AI-written passages from those by established authors.
If machines could now produce convincing music and prose, Sanderson suggested, then artistic output alone could no longer define art.
He situated this debate in historical context. Photography, film, prose, and even video games were all once dismissed as illegitimate art forms. Roger Ebert famously claimed video games could never be art because they were “victory-focused” commercial products. Sanderson rejected this logic, arguing that meaning emerged not only from results, but from experience and emotion. Yet Sanderson ultimately resisted the idea that AI was simply another creative medium.
His concern was not primarily about copyright, energy use, or economics. “These are valid objections,” he acknowledged, “but they don’t get to the soul of it for me.” Instead, he drew on Oscar Wilde’s assertion that “All art is quite useless,” interpreting this to mean that art’s value lay beyond productivity or efficiency.
For Sanderson, art was fundamentally about process. He recounted writing his first novel at nineteen, longhand in notebooks. It was bad, he said but essential. Each early failure shaped him into the writer he would become. He noted that an AI could easily generate something technically better than that first manuscript. But that missed the point.
“I didn’t write [it] to produce a book to sell,” he explained. “It was for the satisfaction of having written a novel… and learning how to do it.”
This led to his central claim: art was not just what was created, but what creation did to the creator.
“The most important change made by an artistic endeavor is the change it makes in you,” Sanderson said.
He went further: “The book, the painting, the film script is not the only art… it’s a receipt. It’s a diploma.”
In his view, AI threatened to remove this formative journey. Machines could generate results, but they did not grow through making them. “They will not learn. They will not grow. They will not care.” And so, he shared, “Because in the end of it all, you are the art.”
Science fiction (African Futurism) and Fantasy writer Nnedi Okorafor approached the issue from a different angle, in a Youtube interview on ‘AI to Support & Not Replace Artists’. She emphasized that technology itself was neutral, “Technology isn’t positive or negative by definition… it’s really how we use it that decides everything.”
Rather than rejecting AI, Okorafor framed it as a tool that should enhance humanity, not replace it. She described a long-standing conversation between science fiction and science, where imagination and innovation continuously inspired one another. From her perspective—rooted in African futures AI held promise in healthcare, climate action, and disability support.
Still, she was critical of current systems, describing today’s AI as “just an aggregator software cloaked in a marketing scheme.” While she accepted that AI-generated novels and popular content were inevitable, she drew a clear line between mass production and meaningful creation.
“AI can’t create those things that are from the human heart,” she said. “They can only create what’s already been out there before.”
Where Sanderson feared the loss of artistic becoming, Okorafor focused more on power: who controlled AI and who was displaced by it. Yet both converged on a shared truth—machines might imitate style, but they could not originate lived experience.
Together, their perspectives suggested that the age of AI did not end art. But rather helped defined it. Art became less about polished output and more about presence, growth, and human story. AI might generate infinite content, but it cannot not undergo transformation through creation.
As Sanderson put it, society still decides what counted as art, “We define it, and we give it meaning.”
Sanderson concluded by stating, “We make art because we can’t help it. It’s part of us… We are drawn to it because we are of the same substance. We are the art.”
