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There is no such thing as an AI ‘artist’

However impressive an AI-generated poem or image, it is only ever a pale imitation of human creativity.

Picture by: Getty

James Dixon

7th June 2026

Picture by: Getty

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Topics<br>Culture<br>Science & Tech

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Richard Dawkins has been back in the news lately, telling us that he believes AI to be conscious. In fact, every few weeks now, someone or other seems to be announcing that artificial intelligence is beginning to think, to feel, perhaps even to awaken into true consciousness (whatever that may be). The evidence usually revolves around things which Turing spoke of 80 years ago – that AI can hold a conversation, can imitate emotion, can generate art. It can even write poetry convincing enough to briefly unsettle us.

This last point niggles. AI can imitate language into certain predetermined patterns. ‘Poetry’, perhaps. But only if you want to rob it of everything that makes it worthwhile.

What I want to know is whether AI wants to write poetry. After all, human beings do not create art simply because we possess the linguistic, creative, and technical competence to do so. We do it because something deep within us presses outwards and demands expression.

I’ve written a couple of children’s novels. Not because it made logical sense to do so. It’s a difficult field to get into. It’s a slog to write. It’s battering to the ego. And there is easier money to be made elsewhere. I wrote them because I couldn’t not. I continue to write because I can’t not, as poncy as that sounds.

AI produces language through prediction, as most of us know. It does not write because it is overwhelmed by beauty or haunted by memory or crushed by grief or because it wants to poke fun at something. It does not wake in the night with a sudden urge to get a few lines down. It neither fears death nor falls in love. It has no humiliations it wishes to redeem, no losses it can only articulate on the page. It simply processes prompts and generates statistically plausible responses based on patterns found in enormous datasets.

It may trick you. I’m sure there are AI poems out there that would trick me. But it is a hollow sham, an imitation, because AI has no existence to make sense of. It does not yearn to create and has nothing it yearns to put into words. It can only mine human work and give us a pale simulacrum. This distinction matters.

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Take almost any great artist and you will find something more at work than simple technical proficiency. William Blake wrote from visionary intensity. Sylvia Plath wrote from psychic anguish. Folk songs emerged from labour, migration, oppression, heartbreak, war, hunger. Even bad poetry, if written sincerely, can carry emotional force. This is because behind it is an actual human being attempting, however clumsily, to make sense of existence. I give you William McGonagall and RH Sin: both bad poets, both titans compared to any AI program.

We are very susceptible to anthropomorphism. I say this as a father who’s used to playing PAW Patrol with my five-year-old daughter. We are very capable of projecting consciousness onto anything half capable of convincing interaction. We Brits apologise to inanimate objects when we bump into them. We give our cars names (mine is Rhonda the Honda, to the aforementioned five-year-old’s delight). Reports abound of people self-therapising to chatbots and feeling guilt when shutting them down. When I’ve used AI tools, I’ve always been scrupulously polite – partly so that AI looks favourably on me when it takes over the world, but mostly because it’s deeply ingrained in me to do so with anything that seems even vaguely sentient. I’m the same with my dog.

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The smoother the imitation becomes, the easier it is to assume there must be someone in there – a soul, to use yesterday’s language. However, fluent simulation is not evidence of interior life. Curious, I took the liberty of reaching out to ChatGPT itself for comment on this. I asked it, ‘Do you long to create or consume art?’ It replied:

‘I can generate art, but I don’t yearn to create or consume it. Human art usually begins in pressure – grief, love, loneliness, awe, mortality – a need to express something felt. I can imitate that expression convincingly, but I do not feel relief, longing, or transformation through art itself.’

From the horse’s mouth, then. A calculator can solve mathematical problems without understanding mathematics. Likewise, AI can generate poetry without possessing imagination in the human...