The Scalpel Isn’t the Skill
They told you anyone could create. What they meant was the creator no longer matters.
I’m sitting at the oral surgeon’s office, a place I’ve never been before. The only information I have about the surgeon is a last name and an appointment time of 2 pm. Well, and that the surgeon is a doctor.
So the dental assistant settles me into the chair and fastens a paper bib around my neck with a chain and a couple of roach clips (or whatever fancy name oral surgeons give them).
A few minutes later, an older woman knocks and enters. She rolls a stainless steel tray near to the chair. It holds a scalpel and an assortment of syringes and medieval-looking tools, which she begins rearranging.
“I’m on an antibiotic for a sinus infection,” I tell her. “Just thought I’d let you know so you don’t prescribe another one.”
“Oh,” she says, pausing with the scalpel in her hand. “I’m not the doctor. I’m just getting things ready.”
I panic for a moment. Is she going to try to do a root canal even though she’s not the doctor? What kind of place am I in? Then I realize, she’s the surgeon’s assistant and, fortunately, enough of a professional not to attempt a root canal herself.
But you can understand my mistake, right? She’s in the right place, looks the part, and is even holding a scalpel. Even so, none of those things make her the surgeon.
The cutting is simple. The skill's in the care.
The same goes with AI. If you picked up the scalpel, you wouldn’t suddenly become a doctor nor would you possess the years of education, training and practice that the title “Doctor” represents.
Yet somehow, if you type a prompt into an AI and get something halfway coherent back, you’re a writer now.
Or an artist.
Or a musician.
Or so the people using AI to create things would have you believe. And so the tech companies want those would-be artists, writers and musicians to believe, too.
Because the ones who stand the most to gain from this false narrative that AI somehow democratizes the creation of art? It’s the tech companies. It’s always the tech companies.
They let you dream so they can harvest the spark.
You can hear it in the language they use to describe their AI service: it “democratizes” art, “unleashes” creativity, “empowers” anyone to create. There’s an insidious unspoken aspect to those descriptions, too: if you don’t use these tools, you’re against progress. Against empowerment. Against equality.
How odd is it that we’re being told “democratization” now involves stripping away the property rights of others — and the right to be the one profiting from those rights — and giving them to other people? Just two years ago, we’d have called that socialism.
Now? Up is down.
Truth is fiction.
Copying is creating.
There’s something seductive about the idea that the only thing holding you back from composing or writing a masterpiece was not having the right tool.
Yet there’s so much more to creating art that. Just ask anyone who’s gone out and bought “the best money can buy” to pursue a new interest in playing guitar or painting landscapes or woodworking.
Buying a brush doesn’t make you Van Gogh.
The expression of one’s experience in the world is the essence of art, from the Sulawesi warty pig painting on the wall of a cave in Leang Tedongnge to the poems of Zaynab Iliyasu Bobi.
Wilde called it “the most intense mode of individualism that the world has ever known,” while Thomas Merton emphasized it’s the way we “find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.”
That’s because art represents not only a way to express ourselves to others, but as Aristotle put it, “to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.” Art is how we make sense of being human and how we express to each other what makes our own humanity unique.
Art is what the machine can’t touch.
In other words, artists aren’t simply people who create to gain the approval of others. They create because it is part of how they exist and, in so doing, they create space for the emotions and experiences of others to exist as well.
Ultimately, Nietzsche noted, “the essence of all beautiful art, all great art, is gratitude.” It’s the artist’s appreciation of the human spark within them and the ability to express it to others so they, too, can fan the flame within themself.
No wonder Einstein declared that “Imagination is more important than knowledge.”
And that is where the tech platforms get it wrong when they claim to “democratize” art by letting anyone reproduce the style of a certain artist, the voice of a certain writer, the feel of a musician.
When you slip into someone else’s persona, you aren’t expressing yourself, you’re simply recreating how a machine thinks they’d express whatever you tell it.
Tell ChatGPT to rewrite your diary in the style of Stephen King and the product isn’t your own thoughts. It’s not even Stephen King’s thoughts. It’s not even the thoughts you typed into ChatGPT.
Instead, it’s the filtered view of what ChatGPT thinks are the important parts of what you typed, rephrased in a way ChatGPT thinks Stephen King probably would put them based on how King writes novels — not diaries.
What feels like creation is erasure.
That same filtering, distillation, and probabilistic regurgitation applies when you’re asking AI to create digital images, music, or any other product, too.
Why does the distinction matter? Because the platforms want you to confuse duplication with creation.
Every input you give to tweak the prompt until the machine returns something closer to the artist or writer’s style you’re trying to imitate? That’s not about you expressing yourself, it’s about you getting the machine closer to expressing someone else’s self.
Your involvement? You’re just there training the machine how to do so…for free.
And the better the machine gets, the more humans it can replace, which means fewer licenses or royalties the tech platforms have to pay.
What’s disappearing isn’t just art — it’s us.
You see, the ultimate point of all this “AI art” isn’t to create art for free. It’s to create articles, books, magazines, poems, pictures, t-shirt prints, cross-stitch and knitting patterns, recipes, interior design plans, clothing patterns, musical scores, repair manuals, checklists and so much more.
None of it for free.
None of it created by humans.
None of it profiting people.
But all of it going to the tech companies’ profits.
And the price? It’s is the best of us: our self-expression. It’s that shared spark of humanity we pass from one to another that stokes the fires of original thought, that fans the flames of imagination and lights the dystopian darkness that’s closing in on us all.
Nothing the machine creates is or will ever be worth that.