An article that I read recently from The Verge called Instagram is adding an AI ‘assistant’ to tell you how to post^[1] triggered some full-circle vibes in my artist’s heart. “Creators can also ask for ideas for content, how to hook viewers, what captions to use, which audio tracks are trending, and how to script videos.” 

In business analysis there is a tool called RACI.  It is meant for project management type stuff, allowing for a charted map of how many people are involved in crossing the finish line of a major project. R stands for responsible. A stands for accountable. C stands for consulted. And I stands for informed.  If those words made any sense to you, you’ll also realize that with each progressive letter the less hands-on the role of the person with that letter assigned. Someone who is responsible, say, is doing the actual work, while someone who is informed, gets an email that the work was done.

Look, I don’t want to get into the weeds on what terrible social media company is using which generative product in a ridiculous way this week. The bigger picture here is that with each so-called innovation and tool designed to automate the creative process, real people are being shifted further down the RACI alphabet list roles of the experience.

Where once we were Responsible for making it, later just Accountable for asking for something to make it, now it seems like more and more AI is just going to Consult us on the things it is making on our behalf. It may seem pretty cushy to work oneself into a sit-back-and-be Informed role, getting an email when your content is ready and your likes have been tallied, but what the hell does that do to the humanity of any of the content this process churns out? 

At what point is it just bots all the way down?

Tin-foil hats aside, this continues to be the human creator hokey-pokey but we’re only ever taking ourselves out of the circle one piece at a time.

I’ll clarify before I proceed: here in this place where I live and spend my days there has never seemed to be any risk of art saturation. We are too few artists in a large community. I am writing to you from a medium-sized city on the Canadian prairies, a government town with a backbone in agriculture and natural resources. We would happily tell you that we have amazing festivals, interesting architecture, and a blossoming art scene… but honestly, they are all shimmering dots on the landscape or calendar connected by long lines of drab nothingness. 

Thus, the reason I posit the question is a bit of a personal one.

It is a question of the amplification effects of generative AI particularly in places where there are an abundance of artistic spaces yet to be filled, and too easily filled by opportunistic algorithms. 

In fact, in a place like my own city where there are many gaps that could be filled by such amplification algorithmic art could easily outperform the efforts of the small (but dedicated) art community. 

It’s not about spirit or effort, but simply volume and practicality.

I spent a week in Paris this summer and the place is lovely, crammed with centuries of human artistic expression inside, outside nearly every building, and painted on the walls and streets, too. For AI to get a foothold there—it feels like so much more of a challenge.

But here (where there is an appetite for culture but seemingly limited humans to construct it) the generative wave could easily become too much… if we let it. And my personal real world, much like the algorithmically generated slop overload of the internet, could clutter up with works of AI art (art, in the loosest definition of the word) and drown out the human voices. 

Video screens with generative slop advertisements are already an eyesore along roadways. Posters in shop windows and taped to notice boards are increasingly spat out by some lazy designer who asked a chatbot for an assist. We’ve displaced our a once-thriving local media with national news aggregators. We are little more than whistle stops on travelling music and theatre productions that are calculated rebakes from larger cultural centres. The latest few food establishments that have gained traction here are imported viral social media darlings with influencer cachet and overpriced menus. And it is early days.

Is it too much, and do we locals stand a chance to hold onto our own artistic identity against the tide of calculated culture?

The easy example of this is a front line “cast member” at Disneyland who no matter their mood needs to come to work each day with a smile on their face and convey the corporate face of joy and wonder, a performance demanded by each and every ticket holding asshole who walks through the turnstiles. 

Emotional labour is a core of facet of generic customer service, an act put on by a person that is meant to extend the brand of the business that employs them as part of the experience for paying customers. 

And it is so expected of every front line worker in 2026 that to see it falter is the stuff of memes and viral internet content. 

We have been training ourselves by habit and corporate re-enforcement to expect a performance along with each and every transaction, so much so that if one walks into a restaurant or a cafe, pushes a cart through a grocery store, or pulls up to have a vehicle service we expect that part of the transaction will include a human pretending to be happy to see us, happy to help us, and happy to accept our bull-headed ignorance with a smile and good humour.

This is emotional labour, and like all terrible inhuman inventions pushed by technology, corporations, and algorithms it is evolving and turning into darker and more entrenched expectations: in fact, I would argue that we’ve baked this expectation so thoroughly into the modern algorithms that prop up the digital social experience most of us barely realize that we have, many of us, become emotional labour volunteers.

We dutifully “brand” ourselves for strangers. 

We censor our speech to make it algorithm “friendly.” 

We become online actors, even with the subtleties of performative commenting, reposting, liking, messaging, and engaging with others.

We voluntarily play a part that is friendly not to other people, but as it is expected from the companies that own and shape the internet, and the algorithms they have in place to police it all.

Zip-a-dee-doo-dah, eh?

It is us, too. It is our penchant for gossip and rubber necking at disasters, but I would argue that it wasn’t until the algorithm turned it into a cottage industry and a lucrative product that meta creative content blossomed like an algal outbreak in mountain lake through our feeds.

Let me interject here with a definition. When I use the term “meta creative” I am referring to a genre of published media that falls somewhere in the uncanny valley between genuine creative works such as film, music, art, and literature on one end and critique-slash-analysis on the other end. In the middle there is a new variety of lazy, reactionary performance that often involves belittling, mocking, panning or otherwise pointing and laughing at (sometimes literally) the work of other people (and this is the important part) with nothing of value to add besides the raw reaction.

Honest critique and analysis plays a vital role in creativity, and any art school grad will tell you that learning how to gather and act on genuine feedback is vital to improvement. 

On the other hand, the kind of sloppy green screen overlay of a mocking primal reaction to something, positive or negative, serves very little besides its own self promotion and amplification on the work of others.

It is a spectrum, of course. There is no perfect critique and there is no absolutely pointless meta creative reaction, but the algorithm certainly seems to reward the lingering gaze of any and all of us who stare a little too long at the simplistic emotional takes of reaction clips. 

We’ve lost something for that, and I write that as both a creative soul and as grumpy old guy who knew a more supportive creative era, now passed.

This is a cross post from Dispatches from Nowhere.