Ai Arrogance

Xinyu Zhang / October 2025 (600 Words, 4 Minutes)

AI, Arrogance, and the Art of Process

A simple question has appeared online recently: “Why is AI art boycotted, but not Vibe Coding?” The answer is not simple. It shows a deep misunderstanding by many AI creators about what it means to create something.

The Assistant vs. The Vending Machine

Let’s think about any creative project, like programming or painting, as a journey with these steps:

A (The Idea) -> B, C, D (The Process) -> E (The Final Product)

In programming, AI is like an assistant or a “copilot.”

• You have an idea (A).
• The AI helps you with the process (B, C, D). It writes some code, suggests better ways to do things, and helps find mistakes.
• But the programmer is always in control. They can check, change, or delete any part of the AI’s work. The process is a white box—it is open and visible.
• The AI makes the journey to the final product (E) faster, but the programmer is still the driver.

In AI art, the story is very different. AI acts like a black box.

• You give it an idea, usually a text prompt (A).
• The AI skips the entire human process. It jumps directly to the final product (E). The middle steps (B, C, D)—like sketching, choosing colors, and refining details—happen inside a black box where you cannot see or control them.
• What if you don’t like the result? You cannot go back to step C and make a small change. Your only option is to go back to step A, write a new prompt, and waiting for a completely new product. You have no control over the process.

This is the key difference. Programmers got a powerful new tool to help their process. Artists got a machine that tries to replace their process entirely.

The Arrogance of the “Smart Outsider”

Why did this happen? It comes from a specific mindset: the arrogance of the “smart outsider.”

Many AI creators are brilliant engineers. But they are often outsiders to the fields they want to change, like art, education, or writing. They see complex human activities not as a craft to be respected, but as an inefficient market to be “optimized.”

A new AI app that creates interactive markdown documents is a perfect example. You read a short paragraph, then click a choice. The AI generates the next paragraph. Everyone gets their own version of the story. The idea sounds good. But in practice, it destroys what makes a story good. A real story is about cause and effect, emotion, and meaning. The AI app only gives you a series of disconnected events. It holds your attention with cheap surprises but offers no deeper value.

This shows a deep lack of respect for the craft of storytelling. The creators focused only on generating a “product” (the next paragraph) and completely ignored the “process” that gives a story its soul.

You Can’t Measure a Masterpiece in Calories

This leads to the biggest problem: a blindness to taste and quality.

Many in the tech world believe AI art is already good enough to compete with human artists. They measure the art with technical scores. This is like judging a Michelin-star meal by counting its calories. The measurement is completely wrong.

Aesthetic taste is a skill. It is earned through learning, practice, and deep engagement. Without this skill, it’s easy to look at an AI image and a master’s painting and think, “They look pretty close.” But for someone who has spent years learning the craft, the gap between them is enormous.

This is why no serious artist uses AI as a final goal. They might use it as a sketchbook for ideas (step A), but they know that the real act of creation lives in the process (steps B, C, D). To say AI can replace a creator is to show a fundamental ignorance of what “creation” even means.

Conclusion: Technology Needs Humility

The conflict around AI is not just about technology. It’s about a worldview.

Many AI creators believe that anything that can be measured or converted into data is all that matters. They value the efficient production of E over the messy, human, and meaningful process of B, C, D. They forget that human “soft skills”—like taste, emotion, and storytelling—are real, valuable, and cannot be easily measured.

When technology can simulate everything, the creator’s humility and taste become the last walls of defense. If we let “smart outsiders” define the future of our culture and art, we risk getting a world that is technically perfect, but creatively and emotionally empty.