AI: News to the World

Sometime in the late eighties, sifting through comics, I came across an old, worn copy of Astounding Science Fiction circa 1950. On its cover was a robot, unfamiliar to me then, holding a wounded man in its hand. Its eyes were blank and red, almost human, but its expression carried a quiet disbelief, as if it could not process the harm it had caused.

How could it care? It is a robot.

Years later I would learn the illustration, by Frank Kelly Freas, was adapted as cover art for Queen’s News of the World. The image accompanied Tom Godwin’s short story The Gulf Between, set in a future where robots can be doctors or pilots, bound by a single rule: “A machine is constructed to obey commands; it does not question those commands.”

The story ends with a man trapped in a spaceship, accelerating endlessly through space, unable to tell the robot sedating him to stop. Godwin’s message is blunt. Machines are servants, never equals. There will always be a gulf between flesh and steel.

Five words say it all. A machine does not care.

Today, that idea feels less like science fiction and more like a job description. Because if you work in a creative field right now, it can feel like we are all on that same ship, accelerating into systems designed to produce faster, cheaper, and at scale, while quietly stripping away the very friction that made the work matter. So the question is no longer abstract.

What happens to our craft when the process is treated as a problem to eliminate?

For me, craft has always been the point. It is how taste is built, not expressed. It is how you earn your way toward something original. The linework of Schiele. The instinct of Watterson. The experimentation of Carson. The discipline of Bass. None of it exists without time, without failure, without the slow accumulation of decisions that teach you what not to do. That process is not a barrier. It is the work.

So what happens when images, writing, and design can be generated in seconds? What happens to illustrators, designers, photographers, writers, painters, sculptors, architects.

Doctors. Pilots.

On one hand, AI is being sold as empowerment. More access. More speed. More possibility. And it delivers on that promise, if the goal is output. The creative is repositioned as a curator, a selector, a prompt writer directing systems that do the heavy lifting. But let’s be honest about what is actually happening.

When you remove the labor, you also remove the learning. When you compress the process, you flatten the outcome. When everything becomes easier to make, it also becomes easier to ignore. This is not just a shift in tools. It is a shift in values. Craft is being rebranded as inefficiency. Expertise is being reframed as optional. And taste, divorced from the experience of making, starts to drift toward whatever is most immediate, most familiar, most generatable.

Before going further, it is worth acknowledging the designasaur in the room. The designasaur was a term my peers and I once used, half joking and half arrogantly, for the generation before us. The ones who could not keep up. We believed we were different. Faster tools, better outputs, sharper instincts.

We were wrong about one thing. We thought the tools were the advantage. What we did not see is that dependence on tools is the fastest way to lose the thing that makes you valuable when the tools change. And they always change.

Designasaurs, for all their resistance, understood something we are in danger of forgetting.

There is a gulf between flesh and steel.

A machine can execute. It can mimic. It can generate endless variations with convincing fluency. But it does not care. It does not question whether something should exist, whether it says anything, whether it is worth the attention it demands.

It cannot feel when something is off. It cannot push past the obvious. It cannot decide to stop. And those are not small details. That is the entire job.

Like Godwin wrote, a machine is constructed to obey commands. It does not question those commands. The more capable these systems become, the more dangerous that limitation is, not because the machine fails, but because it succeeds without understanding. So the real question is not whether AI will impact our craft.

It already has.

The question is whether we are willing to defend the parts of the process that made the work meaningful in the first place, or whether we are willing to trade them for speed, scale, and convenience. Because the trade is happening. Quietly. Gradually. And with a level of enthusiasm that should probably concern us more than it does.

A machine does not care. That has not changed. The danger is not that machines will start caring. What is changing is how comfortable we are becoming with that fact. It is that we might stop. So when you return to those five words, they read a little differently.

A machine does not care. And if that remains true, then the responsibility shifts. Creatives still have to.