There is a specific feeling you get when you score a goal in FC 25. It happens in the ninety-third minute. You are playing as Manchester City. You are sitting in your beanbag pressing a combination of buttons; R1, circle, holding the stick slightly to the left and Erling Haaland, curls a ball past a despairing goalkeeper into the top corner.
The net ripples. The crowd noise, sampled from actual fanaticism, swells into a digital roar. The dopamine hits your brain with the precision of a drone strike. For exactly four seconds, you feel like a god. You feel like you have accomplished something tangible, something that requires a specific, rarefied variety of greatness.
But here is the thing, and it is the only thing that matters: You haven't done anything.
You moved your thumb three centimeters. You did not run six miles. You did not train since you were six years old in a muddy field in Leeds. You do not have the lung capacity of a racehorse. If you attempted to do what the digital Haaland just did in actual reality, you would tear your hamstring so violently it would make a sound like a gunshot.
This is the distinction that seems to be completely missing from the current, exhausting culture war between "Traditional Artists" and the new, burgeoning class of "AI Artists." We are currently arguing about the aesthetic quality of the goal, while ignoring the ontological reality of the kick.
We have entered a weird, liminal phase of history where the output is identical, but the input has become irrelevant. And that is driving everyone insane.
The argument usually goes like this: On one side, you have the Illustrators, the Painters, and the Concept Artists. These are people who have spent 10,000 hours learning how light reflects off a chrome bumper or how to draw a hand that doesn’t look like a bundle of mutant sausages. They are angry because a machine scraped their life’s work and can now replicate their style in six seconds.
On the other side, you have the AI Enthusiasts, the "Prompt Engineers." They argue that art is about ideas, not muscle memory. They say that using Midjourney is just like using a camera. They say, "Look at this image. It is beautiful. Therefore, I am an artist."
And, strictly speaking, they are right. AI art is art. If we are going to accept that a banana duct-taped to a wall is art (and we do), then a hyper-realistic image of Pope Francis wearing a Balenciaga puffer jacket is also art.
But saying "it is art" is a semantic trap. It settles nothing. The problem isn’t whether it’s art; the problem is that we are trying to compare two things that look the same but share absolutely no DNA.
Consider the Sistine Chapel. When Michelangelo went up on that scaffold, he didn’t just have a cool idea for a ceiling. He spent four years twisting his spine into a corkscrew, blinded by plaster dust, fighting with the Pope, inhaling toxic fumes, and risking a fatal plummet onto the stone floor of the Vatican. The art wasn’t just the paint; the art was the agony. It was the undeniable fact that a human being pushed his physical and mental limitations to the breaking point to touch the face of God.
Now compare that with an AI artist; He sits in a Herman Miller chair. He has a latte. He types: /imagine prompt: God touching Adam, cinematic lighting, hyper-realistic, 8k. He hits Enter. Four seconds later, he has an image that is technically superior to the fresco.
"I made this," he says which is essentially the digital equivalent of walking up to a vending machine, selecting B4, and when a hot dog dispenses, triumphantly exclaiming you made dinner.
The fundamental problem with AI art and the reason it feels so hollow, even when it looks so cool - is that it completely removes the concept of failure.
In traditional art, failure is the medium. The painting is defined by the mistakes the artist fixed, or the limitations they worked around. The brushstroke that went slightly left, forcing the artist to pivot and turn a tree into a bush (the Bob Ross method). The tension in a chaotic Jackson Pollock drip is the tension of knowing that if he spills the paint wrong, the whole canvas is ruined.
If the Prompt Engineer types in a command and the AI generates a hand with seven fingers and a thumb growing out of the palm, there is no crisis. There is no dark night of the soul. He does not drink a bottle of cheap bourbon like Bukowski and stare into the abyss. He just hits "rerun".
When failure is impossible, success becomes indistinguishable.
If I can generate 500 masterpieces in an hour, which one is the masterpiece?
This is why the "AI Artists" claiming equal footing with traditional artists feels so offensive to the latter group. It’s not just about copyright or jobs, though those are valid economic terrors. It’s about the stolen valor of struggle.
It’s like someone who "ran" a marathon on a Vespa waiting at the finish line, holding a medal, confusing the spectators' confusion for jealousy. "I finished the 26.2 miles," they say. "I went the distance. My time was actually faster than the guy who ran. Why are you saying I’m not a runner?"
Well, technically, you traveled the distance. You arrived at the destination. But you didn’t run. And running was the whole point.
We are moving toward a culture where the result is the only metric of value. We want the song, but we don't care if a human sang it. We want the novel, but we don't care if a human suffered to write it. We want the visual feast, but we don't care if it was hallucinated by a server farm in Oregon.
There is a nihilistic efficiency to this. It suggests that the human experience; the doubt, the wrist pain, the writer's block, the years of sucking before you get good - is just "friction" to be optimized away.
But that friction is where the humanity lives.
Imagine the feat of free solo climbing El Capitan, scaling a sheer cliff face without ropes or safety gear - versus a helicopter setting a person down on the exact same summit.
The destination (the summit) is the same. The result is identical: a human standing atop El Capitan. The value is not in being on top, but in the stakes involved in the journey. The climber’s success is measured against the 100% certainty of death upon failure. The helicopter drop involves no failure, and therefore, no significant success.
The culture war we are seeing now is a clash between two definitions of "value."
To the AI proponent, value is the final product. It is the JPEG (and look how that worked out for NFTs). It is the content. If the content is good, the value is high.
To the traditional artist (and, I suspect, to most people who truly love art), value is the process. It is the communication of one human soul to another, saying, “I saw the world this way, and I worked really hard to show you.”
We can fill the world with AI art. We can cover every billboard and Instagram feed with stunning, perfect, glitch-free imagery created by algorithms that have studied the entire history of human aesthetics. It will look perfect. It will be the visual equivalent of scoring 50 goals a game in FIFA on "Beginner" difficulty.
But we will eventually get bored. We will scroll past it with glazed eyes. Because deep down, we know the difference between the World Cup Final and a video game. We know the difference between a miracle and a calculation.
And we know that a goal without a goalkeeper isn't really a goal at all. It’s just a ball rolling across a line.
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