What's the future of creative work without human intent?

Nicholas Carr has written about the prospects for creative work in an age of digital production. He argues that the era where technology merely copies art has given way to one where AI generates it by stripping away human intent and replacing it with mathematical patterns. This results in a flood of “efficient” but hollow content, which forces creators into a relentless “dance marathon” to feed the digital platforms. He suggests that as machine-made “slop” becomes the norm, the true value of art will lie in its humanity. In other words the slow, intentional, and relatively inefficient activities that a computer can’t replicate will be recognised as worthwhile. They’ll literally be a measure of value. He touches here on a couple of themes I’ve been considering too. The first theme is what it means for everything to be turned into ‘content’, and for a whole class of ‘content creators’ to rise from nowhere, the way a gold rush would generate a legion of instant but mainly ersatz gold…