Can code capture consciousness? The unsettling rise of AI in art

A child drawing on a wall is not trying to be original. The sun may be purple. The house may float in the sky. A dog may be larger than a tree. None of it makes sense. Yet the child remains completely absorbed in the act itself. The drawing is not trying to impress anyone. It is not chasing an audience. It does not know what beauty is supposed to look like. It is simply trying to give shape to a feeling. Which is perhaps why the arrival of artificial intelligence into art has unsettled people so deeply.

When Nobel-winning novelist Olga Tokarczuk found herself defending her use of generative AI while writing fiction, the reaction was unusually emotional. The same unease resurfaced when The Serpent in the Grove by Caribbean writer Jamir Nazir, which won the Commonwealth Short Story Prize 2026, was flagged by AI-detection tools as potentially machine-generated. Nazir denied using AI. The organisers stood by the work. Yet, the argument quickly spiralled beyond one writer or one short story.

Nobody worries when AI organises spreadsheets. The anxiety begins when AI enters the imagination. What exactly are people trying to defend when they defend human creativity? The answer may have less to do with intelligence than with experience. A machine can read every poem ever written about rain. It can study thousands of paintings and films in which rain signals longing, sadness or love. But it has never stood outside a school gate on a rainy day waiting for a parent who is late. It has never watched a familiar street disappear beneath monsoon rains. It has never associated rain with a first heartbreak, a difficult goodbye or the relief of finally getting home.

Artificial intelligence has access to humanity’s archives. What it does not possess is a life. The distinction sounds simple, but it helps explain why so many conversations about AI eventually drift towards memory. For Divya Singh, a visual artist from Delhi whose work often returns to archives and memory, AI’s memories are still “our memories and the memories of the internet”. As she puts it, the machine remembers only what human beings have already left behind.

The observation points towards a difference that is easy to overlook. Think of an old school notebook discovered years later in a cupboard. The notebook itself is an archive. But the embarrassment of a badly written poem, the smell of old paper, the friend whose handwriting appears on the margin, the person you used to be when you wrote those pages—that is memory. The object remains the same, but the experience changes every time you return to it. Perhaps that is why one of the most striking AI trends of recent years involved people generating images of themselves embracing younger versions of themselves. Many admitted they cried while looking at childhood moments that had never happened. The emotions were real, but the memories were synthetic.

The same discomfort appears elsewhere. People increasingly ask AI to write apology messages, breakup texts and eulogies. When author and influencer Prajakta Koli revealed that she had used ChatGPT while writing the acknowledgements section of her novel Too Good To Be True, the reaction seemed surprisingly intense. The acknowledgements were not the novel. Yet many readers felt uneasy. Perhaps because gratitude, like grief, belongs to a deeply human space. It is one thing to ask a machine to organise information. It is another to ask it to organise feeling.

Yet memory and feeling alone do not explain creativity. Art is shaped not only by experience, but also by originality. Novelist and filmmaker Samit Basu believes that many discussions about AI art are running ahead of reality. Current AI systems, he argues, remain fundamentally imitative. He says, “You can’t expect an imitation to be better than actual art.” This is an interesting observation, because some of the most important artists in history were initially rejected precisely because their work did not resemble anything that came before them. Premchand wrote about poverty, caste and humiliation when literature often preferred safer subjects. Ismat Chughtai was dragged to court over her short story Lihaaf, which dealt with the same-sex relationship of a woman and her servant. Kafka seemed strange. Van Gogh sold almost nothing during his lifetime. Originality often arrives looking unfamiliar. It rarely emerges from a calculation of what people already like. And that is where another concern begins. The internet is increasingly built around prediction. Recommendation systems study what we watch, click, pause on and return to. Social media feeds are full of AI-generated images designed to trigger recognisable emotions like loneliness, nostalgia and melancholy. However, before AI, influence often involved wandering. A writer stumbled upon a painting and carried it around for years. A filmmaker became obsessed with an image without fully understanding why. Discovery required getting lost. And now it is more about how prediction works differently. It tries to reduce ‘accidental discoveries’.

Filmmaker Krishand R.K., whose latest Malayalam film Masthishka Maranam is set in a dystopian Kochi of 2046, has used AI extensively in his creative process. Yet, his biggest concern is not AI-generated images. As he puts it, “If platforms learn exactly what kinds of stories audiences respond to, those preferences may slowly begin shaping the stories that get told.” If data repeatedly shows that audiences prefer happy endings or familiar emotional arcs, creators may gradually feel pushed in that direction. And then nobody will have to ban anything, the pressure will come from the data itself. This is why the controversy surrounding the AI-altered ending of Raanjhanaa felt significant. Director Aanand L. Rai argued that changing the ending altered the emotional truth of the film. The debate was not really about technology. It was about who gets to decide what a story becomes.

Something similar happened when social media feeds filled with AI-generated images inspired by Studio Ghibli. What people admired in Ghibli was never merely the visual style. It was the patience of those films. Their attention to silence, weather, landscapes and ordinary life. The aesthetic travelled easily, but the world-view did not. Which brings us to process. Human creativity rarely moves in a straight line. What looks like a mistake or imperfection often becomes part of the work. Saju Kunhan, whose installations draw from found objects, memory and material histories, describes the finished artwork as merely “a residue” of a much longer process. The phrase lingers because it shifts attention away from the final object. The artwork is not the whole story. It is what remains after the searching, collecting, failing, revising and discovering have already happened. Machines are exceptionally good at producing results, whereas human beings often discover meaning on the way.

And that leads to the most important question: what is art actually for? Nikhil Chopra, artist, performer and co-curator of the sixth edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, approaches the debate differently. For him, art is not merely about producing images or objects; it is about consciousness. It changes how people see the world and themselves. Machines may learn patterns, but human beings experience life. Art does not simply communicate information; it changes awareness itself. He also resists treating AI as either a miracle or a catastrophe. “Fire, after all, is a technology too,” he says. Fire can cook a meal or burn down a city, hence it is not black and white. So, maybe, the question is not whether technology is good or bad, but whether we possess the wisdom to use it well.

Perhaps that is why the argument around AI and creativity feels larger than a debate about software. The child drawing on the wall does not know any of this. The drawing may be awkward, the colours may spill outside the lines. But before the child learns what beauty is supposed to look like, something happens. A feeling finds its way into the world. For centuries, art has helped humans make sense of being alive. The mystery was never how a painting is made, or how a story is written. The mystery is why certain stories stay with us, why some images refuse to leave us, and why we keep creating at all. AI has not answered those questions. If anything, it has brought us back to them. Back to the old mystery of where a song comes from, why a memory suddenly returns years later, or what compels a child to draw on a wall at all. Can creation ever be separated from the experience of being alive?