AI as creative adversary, collaborator, and scapegoat

by | Jul 15, 2026 | Culture | 0 comments

Culture Brief 2026-07-15

Ideas in Circulation

AI as creative adversary, collaborator, and scapegoat

The week’s most persistent argument concerns what artificial intelligence does to human creative purpose — not economically but existentially.

Three distinct registers of the same anxiety appeared simultaneously: an animator at Aeon working through what it means to make things when an AI can generate infinite variants of your output; Nolan publicly defending creative filmmaking against replacement anxiety while deflecting the question of whose work AI trains on; and the music industry proposing disclosure labels as a kind of harm-reduction strategy. The labeling proposal is worth watching carefully — it treats AI-generated content the way cigarettes were once treated, which implies a regulatory framework is forming around creative authenticity before anyone has properly defined what authenticity means in this context.

Silicon Valley’s annexation of science fiction

The argument that tech culture has been selectively looting science fiction’s optimism while discarding its critique is gaining momentum beyond academic circles.

Ali Rıza Taşkale’s Aeon essay argues that when Musk or Bezos cite science fiction as inspiration, they’re performing a selective reading — extracting the techno-utopian premise while abandoning the genre’s deep tradition of warning, critique, and political horror. The concurrent Foucault centenary coverage in the NYT adds a structural frame: Foucault’s concepts of surveillance, biopower, and governmentality now describe not dystopian fiction but operating reality. That two sources are converging on the idea that the future’s architects are misreading their source texts suggests this critique is moving from the academic fringe toward mainstream cultural argument.

Broadway’s structural crisis and the death of the new musical

Multiple sources are circling the same institutional failure: Broadway is reverting to a star-vehicle model that crowds out original work.

Lloyd Webber’s comments on the closing of his own revival are less self-serving than they first appear when read alongside the NYT’s structural analysis, which traces skittish investors, Hollywood actors filling marquees, and gate-keeping theater owners as the combined forces driving out original musicals. The concern isn’t nostalgia for old formats — it’s that the financial risk architecture of Broadway now systematically punishes novelty. This matters beyond theater: Broadway functions as a pipeline for the broader culture’s capacity to produce new narrative forms at scale.

The institution under political pressure

The Smithsonian board vacancy story and the PEN America presidential resignation point to a quieter battle over who controls cultural institutions and on what terms.

What’s notable in both cases is the absence of organized opposition. The Smithsonian vacancies go unfilled while a political battle proceeds largely out of public view. At PEN, the resignation of Dinaw Mengestu signals that the organization’s internal contradictions around free expression and political solidarity have become unmanageable. Institutions that define cultural legitimacy are being reshaped, and the silence is itself the signal.

The return of handcraft as philosophical position

The Aeon essay on “skill nostalgia” connects a cultural trend — artisanal hobbies, making-by-hand — to something more serious: a reasoned rejection of legibility and productivity as values.

Joshua Habgood-Coote’s essay refuses to dismiss beekeeping and sourdough as escapism; he argues they represent a coherent (if inchoate) critique of work’s over-optimization. The NYT’s pernambuco piece, at first glance a niche story about bow-makers, is actually a case study in what happens when artisanal knowledge runs up against environmental law and supply chains — the material consequences of caring about how things are made. Together they suggest a conversation forming around craft, scarcity, and what we owe to analog skill.

Books, Film, Music, Art Worth Attention

Air by Christian Kracht — Swiss novelist’s new work begins in domesticity and breaks open into something stranger; serious literary fiction from a writer with a strong European critical reputation.

It Will Come Back to You: Collected Stories by Sigrid Nunez — Her first story collection, described as erudite without pretension; for readers who have tracked her novels, a useful excavation of the earlier work.

Hélène Bessette and the Novel as Arc Lamp — Kathryn Scanlan’s Paris Review piece surfaces a French mid-century writer whose cacophonous, Stein-adjacent prose is only now reaching English readers via New Directions; one of those cases where the reissue is more interesting than the contemporary debut it’s competing with.

The Polygamist (Netflix, South Africa) — Guardian makes a credible case for this South African drama as genuinely distinctive, not just algorithmically surfaced: the kind of international production that rewards attention beyond its local market.

They Fight — André Holland anchors a Washington D.C.-set boxing drama; the Guardian review is careful to distinguish it from the genre’s tendencies toward redemption cliché.

Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind at The Broad, Los Angeles — The traveling retrospective is paired with a live restaging of Cut Piece, raising the question the Guardian asks directly: whether a 60-year-old act of structured vulnerability still carries charge, or whether institutional framing defuses it.

Essays Worth the Read

The looting of science fiction — Ali Rıza Taşkale’s argument is that tech founders don’t merely misread science fiction; they actively strip-mine it for legitimating mythology while neutralizing its political content. The essay is most useful in its specificity about which texts get cited and which get ignored, and what that selection reveals about the politics being laundered.

Clearly Fake: Zurbarán’s Uncanny Realism — Jackson Arn’s Paris Review piece on the 17th-century Spanish painter uses Zurbarán’s strange combination of sublime illusionism and blunt compositional clumsiness to ask what realism is actually doing when it works — and what it exposes when it fails. The deepfakes connection is implicit but useful.

Skill nostalgia — Habgood-Coote makes the case that the desire to work by hand is not a retreat from modernity but a critique of legibility as a value in itself — the idea that what can be measured, tracked, and optimized is worth doing, and what can’t isn’t. For a moment when AI is making that pressure acute, the essay has more urgency than its artisanal subject suggests.

One Thing Worth Reading Deeply

César Aira’s Art of Not Editing — Jeff and Ann VanderMeer’s Paris Review piece on the Argentine novelist who writes forward only, never revising, incorporating whatever interrupts him (a bird flying into the café becomes part of the narrative) is in one sense a profile of an eccentric method. But it’s actually a serious argument about what editing costs: that the retrospective smoothing of a text removes the evidence of how thinking actually moves, and that Aira’s commitment to the unpredictable first-draft mind produces something closer to the texture of consciousness than polished prose can. At a moment when AI can generate infinitely revised, infinitely optimized text, the case for the unedited, the contingent, and the interrupted has implications well beyond one writer’s practice.