Each month, millions of people watch me draw with pen and paper. I make videos where I hand-draw charts and diagrams to explain how things like data centers and power grids actually work, and you can see the imperfections—the penstrokes, the wobbly lines, and the occasional mistake wiped away with an eraser. I only became an artist a few months ago, and it is already more profitable than my previous career in finance.
It's counterintuitive, but AI is the only way I can create this handmade art. AI pushes many parts of the creation process into fast forward: I use AI to research, edit videos, and creatively inspire me. The availability and speed of information has allowed me more space and time to ideate and slow down the acts of thinking and drawing. I draw for hours and hours for each video, because those parts are the uniquely human and precious bit of art-making, and the proof of work behind it is what makes others tune in and trust me to tell them complex stories.
That need for trust is new. It is a by-product of the online slop-pocalypse we're in. Nearly three-quarters of new web pages now contain AI-generated content, and in the largest study I could find, people identified AI images correctly only about 62 percent of the time. We can't trust our eyes on the finished product, so instead we place trust in watching the full process unfold in front of us. The process has become the medium.
You might have noticed there is a lot of behind-the-scenes footage going around—proof of work in the automation era. A good recent example is the behind-the-scenes footage of Coinbase's Oscars ad. This traveled almost as far as the ad itself, because it revealed that the video-game world featured in the ad was entirely handmade with no CGI—no AI at all. The success of the ad is predicated on the fact it was something made by humans that could have been made much more quickly and cheaply using AI.
In other cases, people just want to watch artistry in motion. In Mount Vernon, New York, a company called Monumental Labs is reviving stone carving, a dying art ever since the cost of human labor stopped matching what people will pay for beauty. Now robots carve 95 percent of a block and human artisans finish the last 5 percent, and the company hires three carvers for every robot it installs. They film the human artistry polishing that last 5 percent, and alongside robust sales, they've built an avid online fanbase that just wants to watch the stone get cut. Again, it's proof that human hands have done something a robot could have managed.
If the slop-pocalypse is like the internet's dark ages, I predict we will see a second renaissance spring from it. In this next renaissance, we will pay to watch humans make things as a way to verify—to celebrate and cherish the humanity behind the work. We will see more beauty per capita than ever before as we build new styles of art, new types of architecture, and new ways of writing.
