Human Rewritten

- Sree

 A painting hangs inside the gallery, painted by a brush that never touched human hands. Visitors stand before it in silence; some moved to tears, while some bristled with unease. 

What does it mean when culture no longer needs human hands?

Few will see loss: the decay of craft, the end of realism. Others will see a possibility: a new Renaissance, a chance to expand our creativity. The answer may not lie in the machines themselves but in what we choose to cherish alongside them.

The arrival of AI in the cultural sphere has opened doors that once seemed locked. For the first time, art truly feels democratic. Anyone with a phone can now generate images in the style of Van Gogh, compose music like A.R. Rahman, or design graphics that were once reserved for professionals. What was once the privilege of the few is now available to the general public. In the same way, AI is also helping preserve languages that might otherwise vanish. Reviving dialects, digitising texts, and keeping cultural memory alive. It is building bridges across borders: a story told in Bengali can now reach a reader in Spain within seconds, with little lost in translation. Culture, once limited by geography, now flows more freely than ever.

But this freedom comes at a cost. Authorship, once the foundation of art, is becoming obscured. Who deserves credit for an AI-generated painting, the developer, the user, or the countless artists who trained the model in the first place? Originality and individuality also feel uncertain, because AI draws from what already exists, much of its output risks being a remix of the past rather than a bold leap forward. With endless algorithms producing endless content, there is the danger of saturation. When every feed is flooded with AI-made images, songs, and stories, meaning itself risks dilution. If anyone can make a “masterpiece” in seconds, does the word still hold weight?

Perhaps the truth is that AI is more of a mirror for us than a replacement; one that echoes our creativity, our flaws, and our desires back at us in an amplified form. It democratizes art while undermining the very meaning of originality. It constructs bridges across cultures while threatening to blur the lines of authorship. It preserves the past even as it floods the present.

Beyond human doesn't necessarily have to mean against human. It may mean an expanded vision of ourselves, or it may mean something hollow. The brush has left our hands, but the canvas is still before us. How we paint it remains, for now, a human choice.