Art begins where feeling overflows. It comes from presence, pain, joy, contradiction — from the fragile tension between what we live and what we can’t say. Each brush stroke, each photograph, each note is a fragment of a human story. That’s why it isn’t art to identify a machine as an artist.
Artificial intelligence can already create visuals, voices, and words. But production is not creation. To master is to give form to one’s own feeling. They need to have feeling, memory, and a body that trembles before the world. No program, however sophisticated, can feel the beat of what it imagines. It’s a simulacrum, a foretelling or reshuffling of bits of human expression cut loose from the context which once made it relevant. AI apes the syntax of art while being deaf to its language.
European law grasps that instinctively. The EU framework provides for copyright only in works that are “the author’s own intellectual creation.” It’s also a formula that grounds authorship in human choice — intentionality, judgment, and personal risk of exposure. It’s not merely that something needs to appear original; it should have a source in the mind of someone. A code can’t sign a painting because a code can’t intend or have intended; no one could even hold it accountable. The law honors works of art because they are conscious derivatives.
This is not a technicality. It is a distinction between sense and imitation. A Gothic novel assumes an author — that thing which can make moral claims, stand up for its work, have a name. Without this, art merely reflects a commodity. The image or melody produced by AI is just an expression of that instruction. No consciousness, no narrative, and none of the fear of failure. And when corporations offer this up as creativity, they are not expanding the field of art; they’re depleting the artist.
Philosophy offers a deeper diagnosis. Kant’s Critique of Judgment ties artistic genius to the novelty of one’s internal judgment — making from within, not by rules. For Heidegger, art was the event where truth happened when it comes to human making. Both place art in feeling, in being, in the encounter. Machines, however, encounter nothing. They calculate. They’re forgers of the foregone, yet we’ve never had.
That’s why AI-generated “art” feels soulless. It puts forward something that looks like an object in the real world and yet, on closer inspection, has no reality to stand on. It can copy beauty, but never significance. It can fool the eye, but not the heart. The problem is not that artificial intelligence will become more competent than artists, but that we will lose our sense of what art truly is: an act of presence. The more we dance with machine-made images, the more clogged our sense becomes to this pulse that makes creativity sacred.
This jurisprudence will belie such claims. When writing without a human to write about, the chain of accountability is broken. Who owns a photo made by AI when it’s trained on thousands of uncredited images? Who is responsible for plagiarism, bias, or manipulation? Law doesn’t exist in a vacuum of accountability. The functioning of the entire system of intellectual property depends on finding someone who does think and, consequently, cough up tributes. Strip away the subject, and you’re left with exploitation — of data, of artists, even of culture itself.
AI can automate beauty, but without truth, all beauty is only decoration. And art is about humanity; in the imperfection, the vulnerability, that irreducible spark of being alive. A world with factory-made art would be a world in which art ultimately doesn’t matter.
The signature must be human. Because art without feeling is really no art at all — it is just the echo of something that once had a soul.
