The grand promise of AI has been inverted: while we continue doing the grunt work, AI is writing poetry and painting masterpieces
3-MIN READ3-MINQuentin ParkerQuentin Parker is professor emeritus at the University of Hong Kong and CEO and co-founder of the NGO S3+1. Published: 8:30pm, 24 Sep 2026More than three years ago, I articulated concerns regarding the existential threat of artificial intelligence in a piece entitled “How Hong Kong can play a role in preventing AI Armageddon”.There is an increasing number of articles about exactly this. Here I concentrate on a more insidious encroachment on our humanity – how AI is capturing our creative expression and replacing us in a way that is making it harder to discern what is creatively human.As a scientist, my inclination is to filter societal shifts through the prism of rigorous scientific methodology. What we are witnessing today, across the global cultural landscape, is a profound and deeply ironic AI technological inversion. It is as worrying as it is threatening to the essence of our humanity.
For decades, the standard narrative on the emergence of AI was of the beneficent golden human age that would follow. An age that unburdens us from mundane chores by leaving machines and AI to perform those that are dull, repetitive, dangerous. By liberating us from these chores, AI was supposed to grant us an abundance of free time to pursue the arts, culture and (supposedly unique) human creative endeavour in general: from painting to poetry, prose to performance, from music to mime.
