The Last Human Creators?
Machines might master creation but humans maintain their monopoly on meaning.
The woman's hands move slowly across the quilt, her fingers tracing patterns worn smooth by generations. In her Vermont farmhouse, she is one of the last in her town to resist buying ready-made blankets from Amazon. "Machine-made never holds the warmth," she says, though her children have long since switched to Prime delivery. Three hundred miles south, in a suburban bedroom lit by ring lights and LCD screens, a teen adjusts her phone camera. She's about to film her sixty-eighth unboxing video this month. None of the products are real – they're all AI-generated renders, but her followers can't tell the difference. Both women are creators. Both are facing an extinction of sorts.
A few short months from now, in the corridors of VidCon 2025, teenagers will clutch phones like talismans, documenting their documentation of themselves documenting. The meta-recursion would be amusing if it weren't so prophetic. A fourteen-year-old in a crop top printed with “KREATOR" will say she's stoked to be monetizing her GRWM fails. Two boys debate the ethics of disclosing AI enhancement on their gaming streams. A cluster of reaction-streamers huddle around a phone, preparing to film their responses to a new Kendrick Lamar drop, each hoping their performative listening will shape how others receive the song.And in a corner between two fake ferns, an influencer films a thirty-second clip that will spawn hundreds of AI-generated variations, her likeness becoming a perpetual marketing machine while she sleeps. Welcome to the flickering neon twilight of the human creator.
Looking backwards, attention became currency first in advertising's jarringly youthful social agencies, then in the democratic chaos of social media. Now, as generative AI threatens to flood every channel with infinite content, I return to that Vermont quilter's hands. Her stubborn insistence on handcraft wasn't wrong about warmth, but she was wrong about survival. The machine-made world came for her craft just as it's coming for ours.
The industrial revolution didn't just replace artisans with machines; it transformed the very meaning of creation. Today's content creators – described by esteemed cultural observers as digital folk artists of our algorithmic age – face a similarly existential pivot. But where the industrial revolution took generations to reshape creative labor, AI is button-mashing fast-forward and glitch-skipping the transformation into mere months. In the time it takes to read this essay, AI engines can generate thousands of marketing variations, each optimized for greedy engagement, each wearing authenticity like a carefully selected filter from a bootleg copy of Instagram’s original app. Even the reactions to these variations spawn their own recursive loops of commentary, critique, and cultural interpretation - para-content breeding para-content in an endless spiral of meta-creation.
The industrial revolution didn't just replace artisans with machines; it transformed the very meaning of creation. Today's content creators – described by esteemed cultural observers as digital folk artists of our algorithmic age – face a similarly existential pivot.
Consider Emma Chamberlain, whose journey from coffee-obsessed teenager to cultural phenomenon personifies the raw, unfiltered authenticity that once defined social media. Her deliberately unpolished aesthetic spawned a generation of imitators, but more importantly, it created a language of digital intimacy. Now, AI can replicate her trademark jump cuts and self-deprecating asides with uncanny precision. The "authentic mess" has become just another style to optimize, another prompt to type into the machine. What's more, the very platforms that carried her voice to millions are being transformed. When AI becomes the primary interface for content discovery – serving as doorman between creator and audience – even perfect authenticity might vanish into the algorithmic void.
Or take Kai Cenat, whose Twitch streams felt like digital block parties, creating moments of genuine community amid endless feeds of synthetic connection. His IRL streams, chaotic and unpredictable, represent exactly the kind of sloppy human spontaneity that AI struggles to replicate – for now. But when an AI can generate infinite variations of personalized companionship, tailored perfectly to each viewer's preferences, what happens to these digital hangout spots? When the average person encounters between 4,000 and 10,000 ads daily, most artifically generated, how does genuine human connection cut through the sinewy tendons of zombie comms?
This is where the industrial revolution comparison breaks down in interesting ways. Factory-made quilts could never capture the subtle imperfections of faded cotton flannel squares that made the work of grandmothers into art. But AI-generated content? It's learning to aesthetically fake authenticity with creepy too-perfect precision. It can mimic the charming stutters, the casual asides, the perfectly imperfect editing that signals "human-made." The formerly uncanny valley is becoming a paradise of synthetic intimacy and battery-powered warmth, where even our search for information is mediated by AI interfaces that synthesize and summarize human knowledge into snackalicious chunks.
But even in this semi-dystopian forecast, I see a peculiar, spunky hope. When photography arrived, not all painters quit – some evolved. Abstract expressionism emerged precisely because mechanical reproduction had liberated art from pure representation. Similarly, AI might force us to rediscover what's uniquely human about creation, pushing us toward new forms of expression that machines cannot easily replicate.
The savvier creators are already adapting, not by resisting AI but by understanding how to preserve their humanity within it. Some are using AI to scale their presence – allowing intentionally manufactured versions of themselves to handle routine interactions while reserving their true voice for moments that matter. Others are building direct relationships with their audiences through newsletters and community spaces, creating digital BYOBunkers where algorithms don't mediate every interaction. Look at Bo Burnham, whose "Inside" special during the pandemic transformed isolation into art, or Rebecca Jennings' Substack examining the absurdities of internet culture with human insight AI can’t yet match. They're moving away from the mass platforms where AI will colonize like kudzu, instead creating DIY "close friends" feeds where a Resistance of sorts can germinate and human connection still matters.
The savvier creators are already adapting, not by resisting AI but by understanding how to preserve their humanity within it.
They're moving away from the mass platforms where AI will colonize like kudzu, instead creating DIY "close friends" feeds where a Resistance of sorts can germinate and human connection still matters.
Consider the rise of para-content: the reaction videos, the video essays, the endless streams of Super Bowl half-time show explainers that surrounds primary content like scholarly commentary around an ancient text. Just as the Midrash serves as rabbinic authority in interpreting the Torah, today's cultural commentators serve as guides through our algorithmic wilderness. Their work suggests another path forward for human creators – not just making content, but making meaning.
In this lens, reaction channels aren't just performing excitement for clicks; they're modern-day griots, helping audiences process and contextualize the flood of content washing over them. When a streamer reacts to K-Dot’s diss track or a creator dissects this morning’s viral trend, they're not just creating entertainment – they're performing cultural interpretation, helping to shape how their community receives and understands the content. This role of "contextualizer" may prove more resistant to AI replication than primary content creation itself.
But even this meta-layer isn't safe from synthetic replication. AI is already learning to generate reaction videos, to simulate the gasp of surprise or the thoughtful pause that signals authentic engagement. We're approaching a horizon where not just the content, but the cultural commentary around it might be machine-generated, with AI reaction channels responding to AI music critiquing AI art. The recursive loop of para-content might itself become algorithmic.
Yet here too lies opportunity. As AI floods the space with both primary content and synthetic reactions, the value of genuine human interpretation – grounded in lived experience and real cultural understanding – may actually increase. The ability to truly contextualize, to draw meaningful connections between cultural artifacts, to provide the kind of nuanced commentary that requires genuine understanding of human experience – these skills become more precious, not less, in an age of artificial meaning-making.
As AI floods the space with both primary content and synthetic reactions, the value of genuine human interpretation – grounded in lived experience and real cultural understanding – may actually increase… these skills become more precious, not less, in an age of artificial meaning-making.
These aren't just survival strategies; I choose to interpret them as early signals of a creative renaissance. When everything can be generated, nothing generated matters. What remains valuable is the irreplicable: human curation born of geeky passion, contextual understanding, authentic weirdness. Consider how Drew Afualo's TikTok takedowns of misogynists work not just because of their content, but because of their cultural context and moral clarity – qualities that require genuine human understanding and conviction. These creators are hand-poke tattooing proof of humanity into their work, elements that demonstrate genuine involvement and can't be easily replicated by pattern-matching algorithms.
The concept of "audience capture" – the slow, wilting surrender of authenticity to metrics – may prove oddly prophylactic. The creators who big-wave surf the AI flood will be those who never fully optimized and sold themselves out for algorithms in the first place. Those who maintained their inefficiencies, their controversies, their human friction. They're the ones building new spaces where value isn't measured in views or likes but in the depth of connection, the authenticity of their dap, the warmth of human recognition.
As both a creative director and a chronically online cultural observer, I've witnessed the pendulum swing between authenticity and optimization, between human messiness and cold, machine precision. Now, as generative AI swings an aluminum bat, smacking that pendulum to its algorithmic extreme, I suspect we'll see a profound counter-swing. Not toward some anti-vaxxer’s rejection of science and technology, but toward a new understanding of human creativity's value in an AI-saturated world.
…as generative AI swings an aluminum bat, smacking that pendulum to its algorithmic extreme, I suspect we'll see a profound counter-swing… toward a new understanding of human creativity's value in an AI-saturated world.
Grandmothers eventually did buy Amazon blankets. But many kept quilting, finding joy in the process rather than the product. Today's digital folk artists face a similar choice: adapt without surrendering, evolve without disappearing. The future of human creativity isn't about competing with AI's capacity for endless generation, but about cultivating spaces and practices where human judgment, context, and connection remain central. In the end, the creator economy's survival may depend not on resisting AI, but on remembering what machines can't really create: the warmth of human hands on the digital quilt, the irreplaceable value of a voice that speaks from lived experience rather than learned patterns, and most crucially, the ability to weave meaning from the endless threads of content that make up our cultural tapestry.
Bytedance’s “Goku” circa February 12, 2025 (via @minchoi). This the worst quality of generative-AI video we’ll see this year (it only gets better and better every week). And costs are reportedly dropping more than 90%. Project page here: https://saiyan-world.github.io/goku/