ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok. What speaks to you? What connects you? Do our fingertips not create the most simple, intimate form of connection that is physical touch? Why has Gen Z begun to rely on a machine that fails to perfect the hands that hold our connection?
AI Limitations
As you have likely seen in images created by artificial intelligence, these computers rarely portray the human hands realistically. Some depictions end up with extra fingers, misplaced fingernails, or disproportions. Though viewers often find humour in these mistakes, it is this exact phenomenon that speaks to the futility in trusting a computer with the production of art.Â
The hands are the very thing that connect us. Different sizes, tasks, and textures, they are what we create with. Our hands are the water that erodes our world to leave our mark. Our hands are the wind whispering with the leaves to orchestrate music. Our hands are the fountain from which our body of words flows through. It is no wonder that such a cold technology which lacks a soul is unable to produce the very thing that carries ours. For our hands hold all of the physical creations of what our eyes, mind, and heart long to create. A technology can only produce the physical, lacking the passion behind it.
The Impact
Artificial intelligence began with numbers, and continues to speak through them. Though users may see sentences, each of the words used were translated from number sequences. How could a number sequence ever replicate the delicate task of word choice. These computers which were created to learn, and recreate humanistic patterns, threaten the very words which we spend our lives searching for. In creative writing, it is this searching that allows us to weave our threads of existence into our vocabulary. These are the threads which others are then able to trace and attach themselves to. Individual creativity is born from our complex and nuanced lives, allowing us the possibility to relate to each other. Our experiences forge the soul from the fire of reality. Artificial intelligence is only able to learn the patterns which we create with. It is unable to reach beyond the patterns to understand what thoughts form them. The idea that this technology would be able to replicate authenticity – personality, even – is fruitless. Who are these machines being authentic to? Authenticity refers to the self, a self which is impossible for a computerized machine to occupy. The question then becomes, who is the AI stealing from?Â
I recently attended a panel which was part of TIFA 2025, titled “Artificial Intelligence: Creativity and the Classroom.” During which, the panelist David Chariandy – a Canadian writer and University of Toronto professor – brought up the copyright issues with the “mimicking,” which AI has been taught to perform. Many chatbots allow you to prompt them to write as if they were a specific person. For example, you could prompt it to “Write a short story as if Michael Ondaatje wrote it,” through which, the AI would attempt to mimic the style, diction, and tone of Michael Ondaatje. Though this may seem beneficial for continuing unfinished works by deceased authors, or imagining different endings to finished works, it produces serious ethical concerns. Since the author – whoever was included in the prompt – did not write the specific work being produced, it cannot be labelled as plagiarism. However, the AI is simply copying the original author, without their consent nor knowledge. This creates a rocky landscape for the future of copyright laws on original authored work, and the access AI has to it. Furthermore, it complicates the occupations of creative writers, and writers in general, as their work is constantly being threatened by the artificial intelligence copycat. The mimicking also ignores the ephemerality of human life, and further, of human art. Our art is constantly threatened by the possibility of being forgotten, lost, or destroyed, and it is this notion that proves its value. If AI allows us to constantly recreate work from the greatest authors, what maintains their sacrality?Â
The Future
What, then, becomes of our own effort? What stops us from recreating work of the most famous writers of all time with AI? This is up to us to decide. Gen Z must take the authority, as writers, as academics, as creatives, and as humans, to protect authentic work. It is up to us to continue creating, and fighting for the sacred existence of connection through writing. Our generation must decide what defines creativity, what fosters it, and what harms it. Writing, and reading human-authored work are vehicles which lead to further discoveries of the mind, body, and soul. The purpose is not the mere existence of words on a page, it is the context in which they are created, it is the struggle to create, and the person who exists behind the creation. Or would you like your invention and observation of art to be devoid of a beating heart?Â