A study from Columbia University, June 2025. Figures on what many of us intuited. A group was shown identical works: some with a human label, others generated by artificial intelligence. The latter were sixty-two per cent less valued. The same image, according to the label, was worth less than half. A revealing detail: human art only gained value when compared with that of the machine. Alongside other human works, the effect disappeared.
It is not that we recognise the human through their virtues. We appreciate the human more when the threat of the automatic emerges.
That data fuelled an understandable reaction. They reclaim what the machine should not have: the hand, the gesture, the error, the biography, the trace of the body that laboured. Rankin spoke of his own images reprocessed with AI and said: even when transformed, there remains in them 'a trace of me'. The authentic is that which preserves the human imprint. Faced with the seamless polish of the algorithm, the tremor of the hand as proof of truth.
I share the concern. But that criterion is weak. Relying on it leaves us worse off than we were.
Weak for a technical reason: imperfection proves nothing. A generative model produces, at will, crooked lines, paper grain, asymmetries, brush textures, all the accidents we associate with the hand. The tremor is imitable. If tomorrow we place authenticity in the defect, the day after tomorrow the defect will come as standard, perfectly manufactured. We shall purchase synthetic human imprint and call it soul. Whoever defends the hand as the ultimate criterion has not found the impregnable redoubt of the human: they have signalled the next effect the machine will learn to produce.
Weak for a deeper reason. It touches upon what I understand by art. If a work is valuable for bearing marks of having been made by hand, we say that art is a symptom: a sign that there was a human behind it, their expressive signature, the imprint of their psyche. But that does not explain what the work does, it only certifies who touched it. It reduces the painting to proof of presence, like a fingerprint at a scene. The art that matters to me is not proof that someone was there. It is something that occurs before the viewer, whoever produces it.
Here is the decisive point. The true debate is not machine perfection against human imperfection. That is a decoy, and the machine will win as soon as it sets its mind to it. The real debate is between two ways of understanding where the value of a work comes from. One derives it from provenance: who made it, with what intention, with what biography and what responsibility behind it. The other derives it from the process: what was selected, how it was organised, what was brought into relation, who assumes the result. This second approach is not a surrender to technique. It is how a good portion of the art of the last century has functioned.
None of this is new. In 1859, when photography crept into the rooms near the Paris Salon, Baudelaire wrote in alarm against the idea that an image produced by a machine could belong to the domain of art. It seemed to him that mechanical accuracy would displace imagination, that we would confuse recording with creation. A century and a half later we know how it ended: photography did not destroy painting nor did it supplant imagination, it became an art with its own questions, and in the process forced painting to discover what it knew how to do that the camera did not. The panic was understandable and the diagnosis, false. Every time a new machine produces images, we repeat the scene: first rejection in the name of the human, then the slow realisation that the question was poorly posed.
I do not say that provenance does not matter. It matters, and greatly: knowing who made a work, with what labour and at what cost is a matter of justice, especially when there are models trained on others' work without permission or payment. That is a legitimate and urgent battle. What I say is that provenance is a matter of rights and honesty, not the criterion that decides whether a work is art. They are two distinct questions. Mixing them causes us to lose both: we convert a real labour problem into a metaphysical discussion that cannot be won, and we leave metaphysics in the hands of those who only need to manufacture a convincing tremor.
The hand trembles, and that tremor is beautiful, and deserves to be paid for and recognised. But it is not there that it is decided whether we are before a work. The criterion is not in the hand. It is in what the work does to the one who views it. That is a question we have spent centuries failing to close and which no machine, for now, has helped us to answer. Nor has it taken it away from us.
On the open conversation
This text intersects with one of the lines of my research: the proposition that what causes a work to function as art does not depend upon the agent that produces it, nor the medium with which it is produced. Hence, I align myself neither with those who defend the human trace as proof of authenticity, nor with those who celebrate algorithmic production without reservation. I do, however, distinguish between two questions that are frequently conflated: that of the rights of the worker, which I defend without qualification, and that of what constitutes art, which is not resolved by pointing to a hand. If anyone wishes to contribute from the fields of illustration, criticism, the philosophy of art, or practice with generative tools, this notebook remains open.
Sources
Horton, Carl Blaine Jr., Michael W. White, and Sheena Iyengar, on the differential valuation of art according to its attributed authorship (human or AI); institutional summary from Columbia Business School, 29 June 2025.
Rankin, on authenticity and “the human trace”; interview in Pentatonic, 25 November 2025.
Baudelaire, Charles. “Le public moderne et la photographie” (1859), in the wake of the admission of photography to the galleries adjacent to the Paris Salon.
Regarding the incorporation of AI art into the market and institutions: Christie’s, Augmented Intelligence (2025); MoMA, Unsupervised by Refik Anadol (acquired in 2023); and the open letter from artists against the auction, reported by The Art Newspaper (2025).