It’s a slippery slope from jaundiced portraits in poor rendition of the “Studio Ghibli” style to 745k likes on an image of Kamala Harris presenting to a sea of communist memorabilia at the Chicago Convention center. Neither of these images were created by humans, but the trivial enjoyment of one doesn’t undercut the dangerous message of another. At this point, AI art is inescapable: it’s rife in advertisements, book covers, billboards, and of course, political propaganda. Reactions to it range from enthused to never having to pick up a pencil to draw something, to dismayed by the overshadowing of real, human-created art. Every cautionary tale has its innocent beginnings—namely, in 2021, OpenAI unveiled DALL-E, an AI system capable of generating images from text prompts. With a few set styles and often off-base prompt generation, DALL-E was more of a game than an actual tool. On DALL-E 2, its improved iteration, processing got more accurate, and the number of images generated rose to over two million a day. As of August 2023, the estimated amount of images that have been created with AI is 15.470 billion, combined from DALL-E 2, Adobe Firefly, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion. AI art is now seen as a legitimate tool for efficiency and cost-cutting. Through the lens of Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” AI art can be considered an unconsensual digital reproduction, lacking authenticity and the historical context crucial to art. Even the most complex, six-fingered, digital Mona Lisa, has none of the “aura,” an imposed distance from the viewer, that Benjamin described in traditional artworks. In fact, it’s that very lack of reverence and awe inducement that attracts people to AI art. It’s easy to consume, because its meaning is simple and lacks nuance. When art becomes a consumable, it turns into a dangerous weapon for the aestheticization of politics that Walter Benjamin warns against by dampening critical thinking, forgoing understanding of the process, and feeding into productivity culture. AI art doesn’t provoke critical thinking because it is fundamentally content, not art. This reflects in surface-level consumption of politics in turn. Similar to the advent of digital reproduction, “[t]he public is an examiner, but an absent-minded one”: one not critically engaged with art as an exercise, but eager to superficially consume content as entertainment (Benjamin 19). Benjamin states that people desire things to be “closer” to them (5). This closeness is rendered “spatially and humanly”: physically, art is made more accessible for viewing, and humanly, the often disturbing or complex elements in art are watered down (5). This type of art coddles the viewer, and doesn’t inquire them to investigate further into its purpose—rather than being forced to reconcile with an artwork, the viewer is handed meaning and interpretation on a silver platter. Treating art as a consumable seems harmless, maybe a little brain-rotting at worst, but its underlying danger is revealed when that lack of critical thinking is reflected in an approach to politics. Fascism relies on the consumability of aesthetics in politics to control people. As long as people are devoted to an identity rather than a cause, they will tolerate morally questionable acts of their party, because they have no core politics to fall back on. Expression that propels that identification is encouraged under fascism, think red MAGA caps, the Nazi swastika, mass-mobilized rallies waving flags: the aesthetics of the movement allow individuals to identify with the narrative and become a part of it. Another major issue is that AI art allows viewers to see exactly what they want to see, because that’s the exact prompt they instructed, even though art exists to challenge common thought. With the rise of photography, captions were required for exhibition value and to present a certain agenda. As Benjamin writes, “free-floating contemplation is not appropriate to [photographs]” (8). The caption that began appearing under photographs in magazines to direct the perspective of the viewer missing out on visceral context is equivalent to the specified prompt a maker inputs to generate AI art showing exactly what they intend. There remains little room for original interpretation because there was never meant to be. There are no easter eggs, historical allusions, religious references, or any complex message to decode—not unless a human specifically inputs any. In this way, AI art is a picky eater’s dream: easy to consume and digest. However, reality is often tough to chew, and it’s the very aspects that don’t sit well with you that should be investigated. The passivity of an audience to art naturally leads to the inactivity of an audience in politics, one that simply accepts statistics and campaign promises fed to them at face-value. This is how political parties have gotten away with empty goals for so long: people will align with the side that superficially appeals to them, whether or not anything of substance is being accomplished. Society becomes comfortable with letting someone else do the thinking for them. If the public refuses to critically engage with art, which is inherently complex in its intimate relationship with a human artist, and instead condones soulless art reproduced by an AI algorithm, they can not be expected to critically engage with politics either. The ephemeral nature of AI art arrives hand-in-hand with increasing consumerism. Attesting to humanity’s desire to breach the “aura” of art, Benjamin writes that “[u]niqueness and permanence are as closely linked in [reality] as are transitoriness and reproducibility in [digital reproductions]” (5). That ephemerality is why AI art exists in the first place: to visually represent a fleeting message. Most AI art is not created to stay, to be held in museums and galleries—its purpose as art is diminished as a quick errand to be crossed off on a list of menial tasks. Consider Coca-Cola’s iconic 1995 Holidays ad that announced Christmas just by appearing on the TV, directed by legendary J.J. Abrams. In 2024, the company reimagined the beloved advert with an entirely AI generated commercial: public reception was terrible. People were upset with the low-quality effort, including six-fingered people and distorted visuals. The holiday magic was gone. With little thought or care put into the creative process, it also becomes easier to overlook the environmental implications of AI overuse. The swift turnaround of AI art is comparable to fast fashion, which generates massive amounts of landfill every year. There’s less burden on the wallet, or in AI art’s case, effort, so people click “buy” with the same carelessness they do on “generate.” Being disconnected from the tools used during art leads to a lack of respect for the creative process and ignorance of overproduction. That carelessness is taken advantage of in political campaigns ridden with trendy buzzwords and a reliance on party loyalty without actual significant change or stakes. As Donald Trump remarked in a debate with Hillary Clinton before winning the 2016 election, “[m]y voters don’t care and the public doesn’t care, they know you’re going to do a good job once you’re there.” There’s a demonstrated disinterest in the process of things, the history and intent, in only chasing after a product. This is a bipartisan issue: increasing polarization and lack of name recognition on ballots for local candidates means that people are voting based on party brand rather than concrete politics. It’s possible to consume a political personality the same way you consume cheap, trendy fashion or tacky AI art. This is the “aestheticization” of politics that Benjamin warns will precede the rise of fascism by shifting from substantial issues to aesthetic appeal, without underlying philosophies or goals to be held accountable for (19). The neverending spigot of AI content, coupled with the overwhelming presence of productivity culture, means there’s an unnatural saturation of people creating content, but not people studying art. Productivity culture is a misuse of human intelligence. The mind shouldn’t be treated like an AI that pumps out content—rather, it’s the very unproductive behavior of lingering in confusion and off-topic thinking that generates the most creative ideas. Productivity culture induces restlessness—it’s not enough to just be a consumer, you have to produce. However, people who rely on AI art have little interest in learning how to meaningfully create. Artistry takes practice: everyday skills like writing are still a muscle that need to be trained. Equally, appreciating art is also a skill: an eye for good design is carefully curated over time. The accessibility of AI art removes that barrier to entry and floods the art scene with the content of those who were too scared to go through the learning process of art. Mastering art is a uniquely human process, demanding vulnerability and introspection, in a time where no one wants to exhibit either. Benjamin describes that the consequence is “the distinction between author and public [loses] its basic character . . . Literary license is now founded on polytechnic rather than specialized training and thus becomes common property” (12). AI seems to allow anyone to become an “artist.” If nothing is deemed special in being knowledgeable of the arts, mutual respect between the artist and their audience is lost. Considering the attack on higher education, especially in the humanities, it’s becoming clear that art will no longer be respected as a legitimate career. If anyone can be an “artist” once the definition is expanded to include AI prompting, then it’s not seen as something worthwhile to improve on and excel in. This will further push millions of artists around the world out of their jobs. A similar phenomena is visible in politics, where many people are inclined to feel like they have a grasp on politics just by consuming the content. This results in performative activism with no substance behind it. For example, “boba liberalism,” a hallmark of young East Asian diaspora politics, often overshadows the lower-class Asians who are the biggest targets of Asian hate crimes in the U.S, or sinophobia that diaspora themselves often perpetuate in a way to align their politics respectably. Rather, “boba liberalism” focuses on superficial aspects that give them the appearance of advancing their community. AI has already sunk its claws into political ecosystems. From an AI generated tariff list to AI images on the White House Twitter account—misinformation runs rampant and political detachment has only worsened. Lack of creative thinking leads to lack of empathy, and loss of apathy creates a dangerous cycle, as people who are not moved by others can not create art that moves others. Even the most elementary artist who makes flawed, original work carries a torch for the future by displaying their independence from an artificial brain and their curiosity to learn and improve. The issue with the easily widespread nature of generated images is that it doesn’t matter if even most of us could spot AI images. Only enough need to be fooled to sway the public via herd mindset or enough pollution needs to occur that the general public loses hope in trusting once reputable sources. A catch-all system needs to prevent the spread of AI generated images before it begins to sanitize the information system, and respect needs to be placed in artistry and ownership in the creative process. As well, a level of seriousness needs to be brought back to politics. Meme culture and social media posts seem like harmless fun, until they’re weaponized to draw us closer to tolerating fascist beliefs. To convert from an aestheticization of politics to a politicization of aesthetics, merit in debates and a substantial set of beliefs need to be prioritized over party allegiance and tribalism. Works Cited Bacon Jr., Perry. “Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump Bring Different Levels of Policy Detail to 2016 Debate.” NBC News, 25 Sep. 2016, https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/2016-presidential-debates/hillary-clinton-donald-trump-bring-different-levels-policy-detail-debate-n647596. Accessed 26 October 2025. Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Illuminations. Translated by Harry Zohn, edited by Hannah Arendt, Schocken Books, 1969, pp. 1-26. Valyaeva, Alina. “People Are Creating an Average of 34 Million Images Per Day. Statistics for 2024.” Everypixel Journal, 15 Aug. 2023, https://journal.everypixel.com/ai-image-statistics. Accessed 29 October 2025.