Cory Doctorow used a June 2 post on Pluralistic to draw a bright line between art that tries to make a person feel something and AI-generated output that only looks like it came from someone trying.
The essay followed a Brian Eno talk about creativity and art tied to What Art Does, the short book Eno published with Bette Adriaanse last year. Doctorow said Eno described art as “everything you don’t have to do”: humans need clothing, speech and shelter, yet decoration, song, poetry and stories go beyond utility.
Doctorow sharpened that definition into an argument about intent. In his framing, beauty can exist without an author, as with a sunset. Art, by contrast, involves a person making choices in order to produce a feeling in someone else. A painted sunset or a photograph of one carries that communicative purpose. The sunset itself does not.
AI output as diluted intent
That distinction matters for Doctorow’s critique of AI-generated words and images. He wrote that a prompt carries some human intent, because the user is asking for an effect. The model, however, adds statistical prediction rather than intention of its own. When a short prompt becomes a long passage or a detailed image, Doctorow argued, the user’s intent is spread thin across the finished object.
The mechanism is the familiar one, minus the marketing fog: the system predicts pixels or words based on patterns found in training data, which came from other people’s choices. Doctorow’s point is that this can produce coherence and polish without an artist making the thousands of small decisions that viewers normally read as meaningful.
He connected that reaction to Mark Fisher’s description of the “seeming of an intent without an intender” as eerie. Doctorow said people are used to treating coherent language and finished-looking images as evidence of a mind behind them. With AI output, viewers may supply the missing artist themselves, then experience a feeling they helped invent.
Stories as a hack on empathy
Doctorow also used the essay to restate a theory he has discussed in fiction workshops: stories exploit the mind’s habit of modeling other minds. Readers know Romeo and Juliet are fictional, yet they can still grieve for them. The story’s aim, in Doctorow’s account, is not empathy for its own sake. It uses empathy as a route to feeling.
He contrasted that with art forms that aim more directly at emotion, including music, visual art, dance and poetry. He also compared two Disney rides: Snow White’s Enchanted Wish, which he said communicates the emotional tone of the film without explaining the plot, and The Little Mermaid: Ariel’s Undersea Adventure, which he described as a more literal retelling that preserves the storyline while losing emotional force.
Doctorow’s proposed grid puts art on axes of intensity and fidelity. Abstract work may hit harder while being harder to control. Concrete narrative may communicate a target feeling more precisely while risking weaker impact. He said Eno’s view avoids ranking those modes. The test is whether the work makes the audience feel something, and what that feeling is.
This story draws on original reporting from Pluralistic.