What happens to the conversation between artist and audience when one side stops being human?
I wondered about that after seeing three news items last week: a novel that may have been machine-written, a dead actor resurrected by AI, and songs written and heard by nobody.
Before I get there, consider that a work of art isn’t a monologue. It’s an exchange of experiences, emotions and perspectives.
In 1967, at the International PEN Conference in Budapest, the British poet W.H. Auden discussed the two-way nature of art. “Poetry is speech at its most personal, the most intimate of dialogues. A poem does not come to life until a reader makes his response to the words.”
Ten years before, in 1957, the French artist Marcel Duchamp said something similar at an arts convention in Houston. “The creative act is not performed by the artist alone. The spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act.”
A new voice enters the conversation
Duchamp, a leader in the Dada movement and surrealism, couldn’t have foreseen something else surreal that was germinating.
Within months of his speech, computer scientist Frank Rosenblatt was developing the Perceptron at the Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory in Buffalo. It laid the foundation for deep learning and artificial neural networks, in a field named only two years earlier: artificial intelligence.
Now here we are. Whether on the pages of a book, a performance on a screen, or the music and lyrics of a song, something fundamental is transmitted. You’d figure it takes two people to have that dialogue – not one, and certainly not none.
I thought so too, although the trio of news stories highlighted emerging questions about origin and authenticity in the arts.
Three warning shots
The first reported that publishing company Hachette had cancelled the U.S. release of the horror novel Shy Girl, by author Mia Ballard, after allegations she used AI to help write it. Ballard had self-published the book in the U.K. She said an editor had used AI, but denied using it herself.
Still, many readers raised concerns in online reviews, saying Shy Girl came across like it was “written by ChatGPT” and had “bizarre formatting and repetitive turns of phrase”. Max Spero, founder of the Pangram AI detector, said Shy Girl was 78% AI-generated.
At least that’s better than the 100% AI-generated Val Kilmer. His human form died in April 2025, but that won’t prevent the actor from appearing in a movie titled As Deep as the Grave. The movie went into production in 2023. Although Kilmer had expressed interest in being cast, he couldn’t due to his throat cancer.
So this isn’t about cleaning up scenes he shot. The production just plans to insert an AI version of Kilmer (with his estate’s permission). Spokespeople said “we believe we are serving as a demonstrator for how to do it ethically”, and were honoured “to bring this character to life in the way we had all originally imagined it.”
Bring this character “to life” – an odd choice of words.
Presumably, the movie will have a human audience, something that didn’t concern Michael Smith. The North Carolina man just pled guilty to wire fraud for obtaining $8 million in royalties from platforms like Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music and YouTube Music.
They pay peanuts per stream, but if a writer has enough songs and fans, royalties add up. So Smith used AI to write hundreds of thousands of songs, uploaded them, and created thousands of bot accounts to stream them billions of times.
There’s an evil genius in this streaming scheming. However, communicating through the arts isn’t just about output. It’s about creating meaning, and that takes at least two.
More soul, less slop
Any creative person is now competing with infinite output. But the source matters. Does it feel? Can we trust it? Is it messy, as humans tend to be?
An article in the Journal of Creativity suggests that “creative AI” is a misnomer. If the intelligence in AI is, by definition, artificial, so is the creativity. The piece says AI’s pseudo-creativity lacks what characterizes human creativity: motivation, choice, intention, authenticity and an actual creative process.
AI is a mimic, without a sense of purpose. There’s no artist’s journey, with its passions, flaws and desire for human-to-human connection.
So here’s to artists and soulful storytellers, not synthetic slop.
Stuart Foxman is a Toronto-based freelance writer, who helps clients’ products, services, ideas and organizations to come alive. Connect with me here on LinkedIn, or check me out at foxmancommunications.com where I share these blogs too. More original posts coming regularly about communications, information, motivation, writing, branding, creativity, media, marketing, persuasion, messages, learning, etc.
March 25, 2026