The medium is the mimicry: Generative artificial intelligence and the amputation of creative friction

The impact of AI on art and design - Original Research

Abstract

This article explores the challenge generative artificial intelligence (gAI) poses to the understanding of art and experience, framing the issue through a hermeneutic and etymological excavation of the terms “artificial” and “intelligence”. It traces the divergent histories of these words, contrasting the original meaning of artificial as skilful creation with its modern connotation of the fake, and the etymology of intelligence as an active, effortful process of “choosing between” (inter-legere). Grounded in hermeneutic phenomenology, it interprets this linguistic tension not merely as semantic but as ontological: the fakeness of the modern artificial lies in its pursuit of a frictionless ideal that eliminates the resistance and effort constituting care. The article introduces simulacric retrieval, building on Jean Baudrillard’s (1994) theory of simulacra, to describe the text-to-image gAI act, arguing it replaces ex nihilo embodied making with statistical navigation akin to a database query. While drawing parallels to photography’s disruption of painting, it argues gAI does not merely reconfigure difficulty but amputates the tripartite structure of Care – thrownness, projection- toward-possibilities, and concernful dealing (Besorgen). It concludes that by engineering out the struggle central to making, gAI enacts an amputation of embodied discovery, replacing it with a hyperreal simulacrum of creation.