Why the rules of the game are sometimes the real work.
It used to seem simple. A painter painted a picture. A musician played an instrument. A writer wrote a book. The artist made something. And the result was their work. But it was never really that simple.
Artists have long worked with chance, rules and systems. They create the conditions for something to happen without deciding every single step themselves. You could say they give up control. At least a little. And usually by choice.
Musician Brian Eno has been exploring this idea for decades. In his generative music, he sets up sounds, rules and possibilities. Then the music keeps evolving on its own. Sometimes something comes out that even the composer couldn’t have predicted.
A composer who doesn’t know exactly what happens next. It’s actually a nice thought. The artist becomes the inventor of a system. They make the rules instead of playing every move themselves. With AI, this has suddenly become part of everyday life.
Images, texts, music and entire designs come into being without a person making every single part by hand. What used to take hours now takes seconds. Whether that makes the result any better is another question.
So where does the creative work actually begin? In the making? In the inventing? Or in deciding which result is something special? A good idea isn’t a good picture yet. And a bad picture doesn’t get any better just because someone spent a long time on it.
So the artist isn’t disappearing. Their role is changing. They don’t have to do everything themselves anymore. But they still have to know why.
