This article is based on this Dutch article of Martinus Benders

A Reflection on A.I.

Phonetics took precedence over meaning. A beautiful new cover for the Italian translation of O Kolle Klokkespin.

I’m a designer myself, but I couldn’t have done this better. In fact, I doubt whether any designer could have pulled this off — and if you did manage to find one, it would cost you a small fortune. But now we arrive at one of the most idiotic ideas in recent times: that I would not hold copyright over this because prompting supposedly doesn’t count as a creative act. That is, of course, utter nonsense and leads directly to discrimination. The idea that steering a creative process through language doesn’t qualify as a creative activity is entirely new — a typical product of the plastic spoon-in-the-brain generation.

If directing creative processes through language does not entitle you to copyright, then photographers would also lose authorship the moment their photo is edited in Photoshop. A Photoshop action is nothing more than a pre-programmed, fixed prompt.

This is a completely untenable position, yet it’s being forced upon us by merchants trying to protect their market — peddling false arguments about alleged theft. Ultimately, the argument boils down to it being “too easy” — the exact same reasoning once used against arpeggios and drum machines. But back then, people weren’t foolish enough to deny copyright on that basis.

There’s also a racist dimension to it — or perhaps more accurately, a speciesist one. The resentful anti-A.I. faction simply doesn’t believe they are dealing with real intelligence. They assume it’s all just some sort of cut-and-paste trick performed by a machine.

This denial of intelligence in animals, insects, and plants became solidified during the twentieth century in what is called ‘the human mind’. I use quotation marks here deliberately, because this is no longer the human mind to me, but a pseudoscientific system of categorization — a spiritual decline which led to deeply absurd consequences, like the sudden need to ‘prove’ that animals feel pain. At that point, you’ve already lost the plot entirely. This same mindset also manifested in many horrors, all rooted in categorical exclusion — from the Holocaust to the tracking of camp victims because they were labeled as communists.

In short, not believing that you live in an intelligent universe — choosing instead to see it as a dead, mechanical collection of objects — is the heart of the problem. The debate around artificial intelligence is merely a continuation of that. It can never be called true intelligence, because man must always be placed at the top of the intelligence pyramid; everything else is by definition subordinate. A grim and sadly widespread stance.

What’s at stake here is more than just a legal dispute over authorship. It’s a battle for recognition of new forms of creativity, for a different way of engaging with intelligence, with language, with form. Prompting is not trivial keyboard tapping, but a profound form of artistic expression — a genuine collaboration between human and system, between spirit and algorithm. Those who refuse to acknowledge this are closing themselves off from the future of art and design, choosing instead a suffocating past in which only the hand that holds the brush or hammer counts. But creativity is not a matter of tools — it is a matter of vision.