November 16, 2025
From gold rush to cat rush
Alchemy
From gold dreams to AI memes: is machine-made art worth anything
TLDR: The article says AI art is like cheap gold: flood the market and it loses value, because people want human-made work. The comments explode—some point to AI cat videos with huge views, others warn value may shift or reward first movers—making this a real showdown over what “value” means in art.
In a spicy think-piece comparing AI art to medieval alchemy, the author argues that flooding the world with easy, machine-made “gold” only makes it worthless. Cue the comment section going full gladiator. One camp screams, “Value comes from humans, struggle, story!” The other replies, “Value comes from attention—look at the views.”
User hastamelo drags the premise with receipts: Instagram is “flooded with AI videos” (yes, the cat ones), racking up hundreds of millions of views. If AI art is so unwanted, why are people tapping like crazy? Meanwhile, dzink takes it dystopian: maybe what’s valuable won’t be what humans value at all—enter the meme-y doomsday image of mega-corps “blocking the sun” to feed AI farms. Heddycrow tosses in art history: difficulty isn’t the magic ingredient; art has never had a clean definition. And nprateem rolls in with the burn: this will age like “no one will buy mass-produced goods.”
Still, the most cynical take lands hard: drdrek says it’s a rush-the-field moment—first movers get rich, then the well gets poisoned. The vibe? A messy, must-watch clash: human soul vs. algorithmic scale. Whether AI art is fool’s gold or tomorrow’s currency, the crowd can’t stop fighting about it, and the cat videos are still winning.
Key Points
- •The article compares medieval alchemy’s pursuit of turning lead into gold with modern efforts to create art using generative AI.
- •It uses supply-and-demand logic to argue that increasing the supply of a valued item reduces its value.
- •Salt is cited as a historical example: once rare and valuable, it became cheap as technology increased supply and reduced necessity.
- •The article claims public reaction to AI-generated art has shifted from initial interest to devaluation as market saturation grows and detection becomes easier.
- •It concludes that art’s value derives from human effort and rarity, asserting generative AI cannot replicate that core value.